Mediocrity—the sixth in my “Wilderness Walk” series—explores the halfway point where doubt halts our climb. Originally, “mediocrity” marked a mountain’s midpoint, but today it carries a negative weight. Why? Because we often quit when faced with the remaining challenge. In 2001, I stopped painting despite national acclaim, including features in the Los Angeles Times and Great Falls Tribune. Represented by top California galleries, I sold only three works in a decade. Exhausted by 250-hour paintings, marketing, and a demanding job, I asked, “Why continue?” This painting captures that peril: a woman’s face split in half, one eye open, one closed; a “.5” dollar bill; an “M” for mediocrity. Yet, God, a Father to the fatherless, guides us forward. By 2006, He reignited my art with Falling Frogs.
What halfway point tests your resolve?
Hebrews Chapter 3 & 4
The Bible
Today, therefore, as the Holy Spirit says-
'Today if you hear his voice,
do not grow stubborn as in those days of rebellion, at that time of testing in the desert,
where your forefathers tried me and tested me, and saw the things I did for forty years.
And so, I was indignant with that generation and I said, Their hearts are for ever astray; they would not discern my ways;
as I vowed in my anger, they shall never enter my rest.”
See to it, brothers, that no one among you has the wicked, faithless heart of a deserter from the living God; but day by day, while that word 'Today” still sounds in your ears, encourage one another, so that no one, of you is made stubborn by the wiles of sin. For we have become Christ's partners if only we keep our original confidence firm to the end.
When Scripture says, ”Today if you hear his voice, do not grow stubborn as in those days of rebellion”, who, I ask, were those who heard and rebelled? All those, surely, whom Moses had led out of Egypt. And with whom was God indignant for forty years? With those, surely, who had sinned, whose bodies lay where they fell in the desert. And to whom did he vow that they should not enter his rest, if not to those who had refused to believe? We perceive that it was unbelief which prevented their entering.
Therefore we must have before us the fear that while the promise of entering his rest remains open, one or another among you should be found to have missed his chance. For indeed we have heard the good news, as they did. But in them the message they heard did no good, because it met with no faith in those who heard it. It is we, we who have become believers, who enter the rest referred to in the words, 'As I vowed in my anger, they shall never enter my rest.' Yet God's work has been finished ever since the world was created; for does not Scripture somewhere speak thus of the seventh day: 'God rested from all his work on the seventh day'?-and once again in the passage above we read, 'They shall never enter my rest.' The fact remains that someone must enter it, and since those who first heard the good news failed to enter through unbelief, God fixes another day. Speaking through the lips of David after many long years, he uses the words already quoted: 'Today if you hear his voice, do not grow stubborn.' If Joshua had given them rest, God would not thus have spoken of another day after that. Therefore, a Sabbath rest still awaits the people of God; for anyone who enters God's rest, rests from his own work as God did from his. Let us then make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by following this evil example of unbelief.
For the word of God is alive and active. It cuts more keenly than any two-edged sword, piercing as far as the place where life and spirit, joints and marrow, divide. It sifts the purposes and thoughts of the heart. There is nothing in creation that can hide from him; everything lies naked and exposed to the eyes of the One with whom we have to reckon.
Since therefore we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast to the religion we profess. For ours is not a high priest unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who, because of his likeness to us, has been tested every way, only without sin. Let us therefore boldly approach the throne of our gracious God, where we may receive mercy and in his grace find timely help.