Consider The Outcome Of Their Way Of Life

She admires them and she has never once tried to be like them, and admiration is how she keeps them at a distance.

There are four or five she keeps. A woman from her old church who is dead now. A missionary she read about. Her husband's mother.

And the way she holds them is very particular. She calls them remarkable. She says they were built different. She says, and she means it as praise, that they do not make them like that any more.

Every one of those sentences puts a wall up.

Because a person who was built different cannot be copied, and a person who cannot be copied does not require anything of you. You get to be moved by them on a Sunday and go home unchanged, and it feels like reverence the whole way.

She is sixty-one and she has been admiring people for about forty years, and she has never once sat down and asked how any of them actually did it.

And here is the part that stings. Two of them were not remarkable. She knew them. One of them was difficult, and one of them was frightened of nearly everything, and both of them did it anyway, which is the actual story and which the word remarkable erases.

So let me ask you.

How did it actually turn out for the ones you admire?

Consider the outcome, then imitate

Hebrews gives an instruction about predecessors that has three moves in it, and the middle one is the one that gets skipped.

Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.Hebrews 13:7

Remember. Consider the outcome. Imitate.

Not admire. Not honor from a distance. Look at how it came out, then do what they did.

Hebrews 13 tells the reader to examine the end of somebody's life and then copy the method, and the Spirit who moved that writer put imitate as the destination of the sentence, so keeping people on a shelf where they cannot be copied has never once been what remembering meant.

Now, come here, because I want to say this close.

You are not doing anything wicked. Admiration is a lovely thing and it is what a warm-hearted woman does with people she loved. Hebrews 13 still ends its instruction on imitate rather than on admire, and the Spirit put that word there for ordinary people.

But listen to what you are actually saying when you say they were built different. You are saying it cannot be transmitted. You are saying the line stops with them. And a woman who says that about everybody ahead of her has cut herself off with a compliment.

Hebrews 13 says imitate their faith, which is an instruction to a person who is able to do it, and the Spirit put that word in the sentence for ordinary people rather than for exceptional ones, which means forty years of calling them remarkable has been forty years of excusing yourself.

And look hard at that middle instruction, because it is the honest one.

Consider the outcome. Not consider how impressive they were. Consider how it turned out.

That is an invitation to look at the whole thing, including the hard parts, including the years it did not look like anything. It is not a shrine. It is an examination.

Hebrews 13 asks for the outcome of a way of life rather than a highlight from it, and the Spirit was in that whole-life word, so the difficult woman and the frightened one belong in the account exactly as they were.