It has been quite some time since I graduated college—about nine years in fact. I still remember the refreshing and calm excitement I had entering a new environment, and what college (or the particular college that I paired with) meant to me. It was an issue of identity for me, and an issue of the identity of the community there. I would enter a place with people who were as smart as I was, as thoughtful as I was, as cut-throat as I was. I would see for myself people with supernatural studying skills that defined them as geniuses or warriors with unwavering grit. As our parents, other parents and the entire society taught us, the world was well-structured, and everyone who went to the top college were dubbed “those who have penetrated the stratosphere.”

And even if you didn’t go to the “best college,” whichever college you went to would have some defining characteristic and identity, so that you would have something to distinguish yourself by. “I went to this Catholic school founded by so and so.” “Our school’s medical department is harder to get into than that of the number one school.” And even if you went into the top school, things don’t get better either. You will soon learn that everyone is good at academics there, and therefore some people will actually give up on academics and try to get good at dancing, cooking, drama or anything that they can be the best at. Once I graduated, I discovered that the “race” didn’t just stop, but it continued and expanded. Now I realized that the whole world was structured as a competition of identities, and there is no resting from that race.

Behind each race or competition is a story and a worldview. The race that I decide to attend is the race I affirm. And the race that I give up other races to attend is the race that I affirm over the other races. When I try to outdo others in my fashion sense, then I affirm the importance of demonstrating aesthetic beauty, whether in an eye-catching sense or a mind-catching sense (like showing my chic admiration for badminton and the idea of love while brandishing the logo of a semi-expensive brand). If we really examine ourselves, every time we say “I may not be… but I am…,” or “so and so is just…,” we are saying that this race matters more than other races. Then what is the race of all races? It can’t be something of this world.

Eccl. 9:11   Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.

The races in this world—the militaristic assurance of destruction, the struggle for survival, the chance to erect an indelible legacy, the whole advancement of a human race at the expense of its individual constituents—can’t be the true race, simply because a race with an unjust referee is not a race at all. All the ways in which we try to wrestle away the right to referee are thwarted “by time and chance” under the sun. What does God tell us about the one true race?

Heb. 12:1   Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.

The only race that matters in the end, that will have value in eternity, is the race toward God, or “back” to God. The race that equalizes babies, young adults in their prime, middle-age seen-it-alls, and old sages. This encourages us not to live and die by our own might, but by the word of God.