Strength to Strength

Strength to Strength

A marathon training coach described the principle of progressive overload: you don't run a marathon without first running shorter distances, and each increase in distance is enabled by the strength built in the previous stage. 'You go from strength to strength,' she told her students. 'The strength for mile twenty comes from miles one through nineteen.' A spiritual director in her training group said: 'That's Psalm 84. The pilgrims going up to Jerusalem get stronger as they walk, not weaker. The journey builds the capacity for the journey.' The coach became a Christian partly through understanding what the psalm described: strength that accumulates through faithful movement.

Psalm 84:5-7 describes the experience of pilgrims traveling to the Jerusalem temple for festivals. The journey was long and through the 'Valley of Baka' — a dry, difficult passage. Yet the pilgrims 'make it a place of springs.' And they 'go from strength to strength.' The spiritual pilgrimage described here is exactly counter to what we might expect: instead of being worn down by the journey, the pilgrims are strengthened by it. Each stage of the walk builds capacity for the next. This is the pattern of genuine discipleship: not getting easier as you go, but developing greater capacity for what would have defeated you earlier. The faithful disciple at forty is stronger than at twenty — not despite the difficulty of the intervening years, but because of it.