Pony Express

It’s been gone for more than a century. Yet, if it weren’t for TV commercials, more people probably would have heard of the Pony Express than of Federal Express.
The Pony Express was a private express company that carried mail by an organized relay of horseback riders. The eastern end was St. Joseph, Missouri, and the western terminal was in Sacramento, California. The cost of sending a letter by Pony Express was 2.50$ an ounce. If the weather and horses held out and the Indians held off, that letter would complete the entire two-thousand-mile journey in a speedy ten days, as did the report of Lincoln’s Inaugural Address.
It may surprise you that the Pony Express was only in operation from April 3, 1860, until November 18, 1861 – just seventeen months. When the telegraph line was completed between two cities, the service was no longer needed.
Being a rider for the Pony Express was a tough job. You were expected to ride seventy-five to one hundred miles a day, changing horses every fifteen to twenty miles. Other than the mail, the only baggage you carried contained a few provisions, including a kit of flour, cornmeal, and bacon. In case of danger, you also had a medical pack of turpentine, borax, and cream of tartar. In order to travel light and to increase speed of mobility during Indian attacks, the men always rode in shirtsleeves, even during the fierce winter weather.
How would you recruit volunteers for this hazardous job? An 1860 San Francisco newspaper printed this ad for the Poney Express:

WANTED
Young, skinny, wiry fellow, not over 18.
Must be expert riders willing to risk daily.
Orphans preferred.

Those were the honest facts of the service required, but the Poney Express never had a shortage of riders.
We need to be honest with the facts about the discipline of serving God. Like the Pony Express, serving God is not a job for the casually interested. It’s costly service. He asks for service to Him to become a priority, not a pastime. He doesn’t want servants who will give Him the leftovers of their life’s commitments. Serving God isn’t a short-term responsibility either. Unlike the Pony Express, His Kingdom will never go under, no matter how technological our world gets.
The mental picture we have of the Pony Express is probably much like the one imagined by the young men of 1860 who read that newspaper ad. Scenes of excitement, camaraderie, and the thrill of adventure filled their heads as they swaggered over the Express office to apply. Yet few envisioned that excitement would only occasionally punctuate the routine of the long, hard hours and loneliness of the work.
The discipline of serving is like that. Although Christ’s summons to service is the most spiritually grand and noble way to live a life, it is typically as pedestrian as washing someone’s feet. Richard Foster puts it starkly: “In some ways we would prefer to hear Jesus’ call to deny father and mother, houses and land for the sake of the gospel, than His word to wash feet. Radical self-denial gives the feel of adventure. If we forsake all, we even have a chance of glorious martyrdom. But in service we are banished to the mundane, the ordinary, the trivial.

Taken from “Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian” by Donald S. Whitney