Friday, March 14, 2014

Lent Day 9: WIGIAT? a Tie

For Lent, I have decided to update my blog for each of the 40 days. The subject of my updates is answering the question, WIGIAT?, or Where is God in all this?

Today, God was in a tie. To clarify, the high school hockey championship in Ohio last week ended in a tie, after the student-athletes had played and played, and after 7 overtimes, a tie was declared. The players were a little upset and the coaches were a little disappointed, but in the end both sides decided that for the health of the players, enough was enough.

So why is God in this tie? For some reason, I was thinking about this today, and wondered why winning has taken such a prevalent place in our lives. Don't get me wrong, if I was playing, I'd have been very upset with the tie, maybe even more upset than losing. There's just something so unsettling, so incomplete in our lives without a winner. In fact, much of our lives aren't based on what we are actually doing, like playing hockey, they're based on this result of winning.

What winning is really all about, is comparing ourselves to others, knowing where we stand in regards to other human beings. But here's the thing, the end result doesn't matter. However much you win, eventually, no one is going to remember years from now, or even weeks.

This obsession with winning, isn't just a sports thing, but affects every part of our lives. We're constantly told what success and winning is, so much so that we can sacrifice our enjoyment of life, and important relationships, so that we can get a little more stature, however fleeting it is. And, what's really crazy, is that we not only try to win in this life, but try to leave a winning legacy that will remain long after we die.

What would happen, if instead of looking for winners, we constantly sought to make everything a tie, if instead of individual success, the goal was to create as many "winners" as possible. What if our efforts were not in seeing how great we could make ourselves, but in putting all our efforts into realizing the greatness that God has created all things with. Maybe this is what is meant when Jesus says that the "first shall be last and the last shall be first."

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