let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us

I love sports.

Now that probably comes as no great surprise to anyone. I know that I turn to the world of sports, the competitive world, for entertainment and for inspiration and for many of my insights on faith.

But it isn’t the winning or losing that matters to me, not any more, it is understanding the conflict between what is and what could be, it is studying and experiencing, in the controlled setting of games, the conflict that Jesus called inevitable in the uncontrolled setting of life and relationships and within myself.

Sometimes I see that conflict played out as an observer, a fan. How do people handle success and failure when it is right out there where no one can miss seeing it?

Sometimes the conflicts are on the field, and within the athletes, and they can serve as a parable: I remain – as I have been for decades - haunted by the sight of my baseball hero, Willie Mays, misjudging an easy fly ball in the ’73 World Series when he came home to Mets at the end of his career; and I remain – as I have been for decades – impressed and inspired by Coach Joe Paterno at Penn State who continues to ignore those who would tell him he is too old.

And sometimes, like today, I see the conflict as a participant.

I am not a great golfer. On some days, on some shots, I am OK.

On other days, on almost every shot, I am miserable and I think I know why.

And it has nothing to do with my grip, my aim, my posture, my backswing, my planted foot, my straight arm, my turn of the hips, my club selection or any of the other hundreds of confusing and often contradictory thoughts that golfers torture themselves with, and it has everything to do with my ability – or lack thereof – to block out the rest of my world.

Golf is not like football where you can lose yourself in the game and your every thought during the contest is focused upon the contest. There are too many distractions, too much time between activities in golf. The average golf hole takes 15 minutes to navigate, it is a par 4 which means that I will – on average – have 6 whacks at the ball, that allocates 2 minutes and 30 seconds to accomplish a swing that takes no more than 15 seconds from set up to completion, leaving me 13 minutes and 30 seconds on every single hole to think about everything and everybody else in my life, including my inability to hit the ball well!

Golf is a game that demands a clear mind – as Mr. Woods has been demonstrating recently, that’s not easy when there are other things going on in your life - and I, along with many golfers, lack the ability to clear my mind.

That becomes the conflict of golf. It’s not physical, anyone who plays the game long enough has hit almost any shot they would need to post a good score, but can you win the battle against yourself?

Can you beat back the fears and doubts that chase you?

Can you overcome your own history?

And when you don’t, on any given shot, can you put it out of your mind and hit the next shot cleanly?

Can you keep that going for 18 holes and always expect the next shot to be pure and perfect?

Or will you, as most of us do, allow the bad shot you just took to pollute the next one that you take?

Will you change your swing to accommodate your bad habits? Nothing good ever comes from that.

Will you, as most of us do, allow the stuff of life, which you can’t do anything about at the moment, to intrude upon your game? And if you can clear your mind and heart, forget about golf, if you can do that in the rest of your life, in your conversations and relationships and work responsibilities you will discover a joy in the rest of your life, in your conversations and relationships and work responsibilities that comes from being fully present with each other and with God.

let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us

Our race is not easy, but it is necessary and it is possible

Whenever I read this portion of the letter to the Hebrews I am struck by two things:

First of all, God has chosen to work, most frequently, with remarkably ordinary people in remarkably ordinary places. That is why Moses, with his speech defect, Rahab the prostitute, Samson the gullible and David the murderer are presented as heroes of faith, so that not one of us can say – in the face of God’s call to service – “oh no, not me, I’m not holy enough, or talented enough, or anything enough.” God uses the common people in places as common as this one, but they are people who are expecting to be used, people who have learned to look each day for the signs of God. So it is possible, even for people like us.

And secondly, the book of Hebrews reminds us that nobody gets to see the whole of God’s will played out and explained, not in this world, not in this life. We are all works in progress as we lumber toward what we have been created to be, as pieces in a giant work of art whose borders and dimensions we can’t see.

And there will always be unfinished business, uncompleted conversations, unspoken thoughts, unexpressed love.

Sports capture those very elements of life, the changes and conflicts that are messy and unpredictable, and show us how to adjust to them, that is some of the fascination people have with the Brett Favre soap opera every year.

I watch people as they deal with changes and conflicts, some try to ignore them and pretend that they aren’t happening – if I don’t tell the doctor about that lump, maybe it will go away – we’ve all known, and sometimes been, people like that haven’t we? And we all know that it doesn’t work, we can live in a make believe world for a while, but things catch up to us and we are unprepared. I watch people try to resist the changes and conflicts and create a world for their children where everything is smiley faces and sunshine and it can be done for a while, but when those children go off to school and college and life, they are so lost, so frightened, so vulnerable.

But I also watch people who, intentionally and faithfully, look for God in the changes and they discover, in Bob Seeger’s words “what to leave in, what to leave out”, they discover the world that God has created for them to live in.

Here’s the question that we all need to ask ourselves, do you believe that the world is a nasty and threatening place that we are called to muddle through, always alert to the evil and the darkness?

Or do we believe that this is the world that God created and called Good? And do we believe that we are, with all of our oddities and weaknesses and shortcomings, the heirs to Adam and Eve and when we are placed in the world, our presence raises God’s evaluation of things from Good to Very Good.

For too many of us – and for too much of my life – the first vision of the world has dominated.

It isn’t hard to see the sinfulness in life, you watch the news, you read the paper, you listen to the fears and complaints of people. And once you start looking for the down side, it seems to be all that you can see. One of the dangers among people who live in retirement communities is that they are pulled down, emotionally, by all of the stories of illnesses and surgeries and funerals, until they go native and become dismal and miserable themselves.

But here is the truth and the reality of life: the second version of the nature of the world is the correct one. The world contains evil, but it is not evil, God is doing amazing and remarkable things today in people’s lives, there is a huger and holier dimension to life than our little problems and heartaches.

This is the day that Lord has made and you and I have been created to rejoice and be glad in it.

We live in a holy place, this world of ours, a place that God has created and placed us in and then he surrounded us with caring, loving people – some of whom we have driven off because of our own miserable view of life.

Do things go wrong in this world? Of course.

But if we shape our lives to the wrong, we become wrong.

If we change our swing to overcome our flaws we will never discover our strengths.

Our task is not to conquer but to compete, not to overcome but to persevere.

This is where I have always found t. s. eliot helpful:
    And what there is to conquer
    By strength and submission, has already been discovered
    Once or twice, or several times,
    by men whom one cannot hope
    To emulate—but there is no competition—
    There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
    And found and lost again and again:
    . . . For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

You see, I will not try today to hit any shot that I haven’t already hit, but I will try to rediscover shots that I have made; the course won’t demand anything more than I am capable of, but it will demand that I take my best swing, each swing, on every single hole. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

And in our relationships, new and old, we aren’t seeking anything that we haven’t found before, we are always struggling to rediscover and reestablish the love that we have shared . . . and will again, in changing circumstances and among different people, but still For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

And in our faith, we aren’t asked to pray for anything different that we have prayed for in the past; we aren’t asked to give any more than we have been asked to give in the past; we aren’t asked to serve any more than the service we have been called to provide in the past. But we are asked to keep praying, to keep giving, to keep serving For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

This is the conflict that we live with, the challenge to keep trying again and again and again, this is what Nietzsche called “a long obedience in the same direction”, it is what Vince Lombardi meant when he said “It’s not whether you knocked down, it’s whether you get back up”, it is the strength of a Church, the strength of a nation, the strength of a family, the strength of an individual. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

It is a race that we are running, a journey, a pilgrimage, but it is made up of thousands and thousands of small moments of grace - a smile, a tear, a hug, a laugh - these are the components of our swings along the way. As with the grip and aim and posture and club selection we make in golf, they will determine how much satisfaction we receive, how well we progress around the course.

let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us