Sabbath Thought – Steady Work

The famous Aesop, of Aesop’s Fables, was a slave and storyteller who lived in Greece sometime in the late 600s to early 500s B.C. He is credited with writing the number of fables that now bear his name. However, many scholars also believe that most of these fables were not collected until about 300 years after his death, and that many were probably fables, or moral stories, passed down through oral telling’s previous to Aesop.

Nonetheless, one of Aesop’s more famous fables is the story of The Hare & the Tortoise:

A Hare was making fun of the Tortoise one day for being so slow.

      "Do you ever get anywhere?" he asked with a mocking laugh.

      "Yes," replied the Tortoise, "and I get there sooner than you think. I'll run you a race and prove it."

      The Hare was much amused at the idea of running a race with the Tortoise, but for the fun of the thing he agreed. So the Fox, who had consented to act as judge, marked the distance and started the runners off.

      The Hare was soon far out of sight, and to make the Tortoise feel very deeply how ridiculous it was for him to try a race with a Hare, he lay down beside the course to take a nap until the Tortoise should catch up.

      The Tortoise meanwhile kept going slowly but steadily, and, after a time, passed the place where the Hare was sleeping. But the Hare slept on very peacefully; and when at last he did wake up, the Tortoise was near the goal. The Hare now ran his swiftest, but he could not overtake the Tortoise in time.

The moral that many draw from Aesop’s fable is that the race is not always to the swift. Perhaps the origin came from the Bible 400 or so years earlier from Solomon since he wrote in Ecclesiastes 3:11, “I returned and saw under the sun that— The race is not to the swift, Nor the battle to the strong, Nor bread to the wise, Nor riches to men of understanding, Nor favor to men of skill; But time and chance happen to them all.”

It can be easy for us to get discouraged at what we might think is a lack of progress in our spiritual calling, but what should our spiritual “race” look like to an outsider? What should spiritual change in our life look like? Fast? Slow? Punctuated? In the fable the tortoise was successful by being steady – consistent effort without giving up. In physical therapy work, the adage is progress doesn’t have to be fast, it just needs to be steady. If this is the case for recovery from physical trauma, surgery or healing, why would this not be the case for spiritual improvement?

The Apostle Paul understood this and often used sports analogies to make a spiritual point. Foot racing was a common event in ancient sports, and so he used the analogy of racing in our spiritual calling in several verses: “Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may obtain it,” (1 Corinthians 9:24); “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith,” (2 Timothy 4:7); and, “Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,” (Hebrews 12:1).

Our calling is a calling until the end – until our end. God is not looking at how “fast” or “slow” we are. He is looking at whether we will endure to the end (Matthew 24:13). Run your race (not someone else’s) so you may obtain His Kingdom!

I wish you a very meaningful Sabbath,

Dan Dowd

7 November, 2026