Teddy Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the arena” speech, in part, goes like this,  

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Most recently, Brene Brown has taken up that phrase “daring greatly” from this speech and named her book after it. That book has been sitting, borrowed and unread, on my shelf for a long while now, and I point to it only as evidence that this speech clearly continues to have a deep resonance with a lot of people all these years later. 

To go further back though, I think of Odysseus and the Lotus-eaters. Humanity has always had to fight the temptation to disengage from the worthy fight, to be lulled into passivity and languish in the bleary false-comfort of apathy and ease. At the same time, a thing is not good just because it’s difficult, nor bad just because it’s easy or pleasant. For instance, workaholism may be difficult and bad, perfectionism may be demanding and merciless. Dancing may be easy and life-giving, watching the sun set or the stars glimmer are both easy to do and deeply redemptive ways of staying engaged and present to life. 

I remember someone pointing out that when Jesus says that his yoke is ‘easy’ he means that the yoke is fitting. Yokes are wooden harnesses that link two oxen together so they can work in the field side by side, and if the yoke is ill-fitted it will chafe and tear the skin of the animal’s neck and damage it. The context of Jesus’s comment is work, but work that gives rest, because it is working in a way that ‘fits’ just right. To be at work with Jesus, deeply engaged in life with him in the arena, is fitting work. It’s work that doesn’t chafe or tear the skin, because it fits. So, here’s the full quote, “Come to me all you who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” 

Jesus seems to be saying that we need to be deeply engaged in life, there is good life-giving work to be done; and there are ways of working that don’t give life, that actually do damage. The rest and the easiness that come with being yoked to Jesus in his work, promote neither passive repose or anxious striving.  

I’m bringing all of this up as a sort of personal confession. One of the most resonate and persistence parables of Jesus in my own mind for a long time now has been the parable of the talents. I am haunted by a feeling of untapped potential or unrealized potency that has been shut up in a little coffer and buried safely under layers of fear and passivity. But there are so many ways to justify my aloofness. I’ll admit one way being plowed up by the oxen in the field of my own heart is a fear that takes the form of avoidance through a sort of victim mentality. Victim mentality says, “everything bad is someone else’s fault, everything good is someone else’s job.” 

Do you see how that makes growth impossible? It justifies a kind of unresponsiveness to one’s own life. If everything bad is someone else’s fault, blame and complaining take over and we become happily helpless towards our own lives. Irresponsibility is really a way of giving someone else possession of what ought to belong to us. It’s a form of willful enslavement.  And if everything good is someone else’s job, that works in much the same way, since we put any possibility to intiate healing, change, or growth in someone else’s court.

The result is a paranoid bitterness. Paranoid literally means to be outside of one’s own mind, “para” means beside, “noia” is the word for mind. My good friend Tom has a phrase he used to pray over me, he’d say, “I pray that you stand up in your own life.” Isn’t that great – to stand up in your own life. Sally Clarkson has a book titled “Own your life” which gets at the same idea. But irresponsibility and victim mentality do the opposite, they produce this resentful paranoia, where instead of standing-up-in we stand outside-of ourselves, beside our own mind and life, detached from it and made powerless and afraid by our unwillingness to engage and take responsibility for ourselves.  

That’s a sad way to live. It paints everyone as a threat and a hindrance – every bad thing – they did this to me; every good thing – they never do anything for me. That is a yoke that is heavy and burdensome, it plants nothing but anger, and harvests nothing but lonely resentment. 

In contrast, this week in particular, I’ve been deeply encouraged to watch a number of my friends as they’ve given talks during the Anselm Society’s Imagination Redeemed Online Conference. They’ve told their own stories of how, in place of the old uneasiness, God’s fitting yoke has been laid upon their sore, blistered necks. How deep engagement, responsiveness, and perseverance in creative investment have generated abiding goodness, truth, and beauty in their own lives and become life-giving for others. Their speech has been marked by joy, possibility, gratitude and care. I’ve felt such a sense of hope returning, like blood returning to a numbed foot or arm fallen asleep. 

Maybe you’ve heard of the 80/20 rule – that 20% of the people are in the arena engaged in the fight, while 80% sit in the stands and passively watch. I look over and see my dull sword rusting quietly in the corner and my clean boots looking like they still need to be broken in. I need to keep my eyes on the warriors in the ring, who’ve worn through several pairs of boots and a few swords already. Their willingness to take on the yoke of Jesus and labor in the field breaks the spell of languid spectatorship in me. 

Sara Groves says, in her song “Just showed up for my own life”, 

There are so many ways to hide

There are so many ways not to feel

There are so many ways to deny what is real

And I just showed up for my own life

I think that’s what Jesus is offering when he offers us a place with him in his work, to be yoked to him. He’s working in the ordinary materials of the common world we inhabit, and he’s deeply engaged in a great work of lasting architecture, building a world without end, stacking holy stones one by one. 

Roosevelt’s human imagination says “guts and glory, grab a sword!”, Jesus’s heavenly imagination says, “those who live by the sword will die by it, maybe try hammering it into a plough instead.” Paradoxically, in the Kingdom of the Christ, the warriors are humble farmers and the arena where glorious battle takes place is the field of vision hardly anyone has bothered to look at. Yet this is where Word through whom all things were made is cultivating a new creation of enduring significance, inextinguishable beauty, its foundations rooted in eternity, and it’s endlessness plowed, planted, and harvested, strangely enough, from the mundane dust of the arena floor.