I can't lie; I absolutely love it - I've always loved the Olympics, ever since I was a little kid cheering on the Canadian hockey team. Yeah, I'm Canadian, and I cheer for the Canadians. Get over it :) And yet these Olympics feel a little different to me...In part, that's due to Vancouver being my hometown. I'd give my right arm to be there right now - how often do the freakin' OLYMPICS come to your hometown? But in part, I think it's because I have a different perspective than I used to have. I'm older than many of the athletes that will be competing, which is kind of weird by itself. I still feel like I'm about 18 most days, until I look in the mirror and see that the muscles are much more, um, well-hidden than they were at 18, and that my hair lacks a certain fullness that it used to have (alright, it's thinning and going gray). My hat is my friend :) But with age comes a different way of looking at the world, and the Olympics, as amazing as they are, have taken on a different feel to me over the past few years. It's wonderful to celebrate the human spirit and dedication and achievement. It's awe-inspiring to see what people can be capable of. It's flat-out a blast to watch a sport you like and cheer yourself hoarse with your friends...Competition can be a really great thing!
And yet, I see us often bringing the same "competition" ethic into the spiritual journey (our relationship with God). See, we go to church, and that's great, but we elevate our particular church to "winner" status. That is, we often buy into a particular church because it passed all the tests the best; it conformed to what we like and what we want better than anything else. To use an overused term in the church today, it "fed" me better than the others. It won. And that's where I make my church home, at least until it disappoints me, or something better, or newer, or shinier comes along.
Or we elevate certain people to "winner" status...We hitch our wagon to their star - they seem to be going the direction we want to go. It seems like they're winning in this whole life with God thing, so maybe if I do what they do, I'll see the same results. They're worth listening to, or hanging out with, or trusting for any number of reasons until they disappoint (which is inevitable). And in many cases, frustration and a sense of entitlement gets the better of us, and we move on to someone else. Maybe THEY can win this thing for me.
Or we simply can't rid ourselves of the notion that I've somehow gotta look better or perform better, or at least as well as, the next guy or girl. My relationship with God becomes one of performance, comparison with others, and one-upmanship that I just can't shake.
Or maybe it's God Himself who's not performing up to our standards. It's as though He's the odds-on favorite in the ski jump, and we can't understand why He doesn't seem to be going as far for me as He seems to for someone else.
It all comes down to performance...Am I performing up to the standards I think I should be as a Christian? Is God performing His job the way I think He should? Are other people reaching the standard I set for them? And the Church, honestly, has to shoulder some of the blame for this attitude. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had over the years where the basis of someone's struggles was the idea that they just weren't good enough; that they just didn't measure up. And these were people who had spent much of their lives in the Church. Now, granted, it's not all the fault of the Church. It IS human nature to feel that acute sense of comparison to each other, or to a standard of some sort. But the truth of Jesus is simply very different from this. We're all in the same boat. None of us can be considered good, by God's standards (Romans 3:10, 23). There are no gold medal winners in this thing. You don't get more of God's love because you did a few more thing right than the next guy. But the beautiful thing is, God loves each of us, in a insane and incomprehensible way (John 3:16). And choosing to follow him means nobody's a loser, ever, for any reason (Romans 8:1-4). We will still sin, yes. We'll still blow it, yes. Sometimes we'll get it right and sometimes we won't. But it's not now, nor has it ever been a competition. God doesn't work that way. He loves us, we choose to follow Him - He looks at us as completely different creatures (2 Corinthians 5:17, Ephesians 2:1-10). You can't cause Him to love you less by poor performance, neither can you make Him love you more by being a better Christian. I know this is an uncomfortable thought sometimes, because as humans, we like for our efforts to be rewarded, and we like the ego boost of doing something better (even in the pursuit of God) than someone else. But this, to me, is an incredible message of hope. Because as much as I like competition, I don't want my eternity to hinge on how well I do in life. I'll embrace the The Biblical truth that says that God's love for me isn't withheld until I finally do everything right. I'll leave the winning and losing to the speedskaters, and revel in the arms of a loving God in whose eyes I am worthy, because of the beautiful sacrifice of Jesus.
