• Stay In The Game

    by  •  • LifeStuff • 0 Comments

    Tonight, I finished the evening watching two more episodes of the best sports drama series I have never seen, “Friday Night Lights.” Wrapping up season three via Netflix rentals, the Dillon Panthers make it to the State Finals game, and after a lethargic first-half of play, the Panthers make a courageous run to erase a 27 point deficit- only to lose the title game on a last minute field goal by South Texas. The season is over. Seniors will move on. The bright lights will dim for the Panthers, leaving them headed into winter falling just short of a championship.

    In the locker room, Coach Taylor has invited friends and family of the team members to join him for an end-of-season speech. In his usual terse and direct style, Taylor tells the kids they will not forget this day, because it is the best game of football he has ever seen played. He praises them for their courage and heart. And in a final salutation, although they lost the state championship game, he lauds them to not feel down because each one of them left everything  they had on the field, and because, despite the loss, “each one of you is a champion.”

    Shortly after watching that episode, I perused my Twitter feed, and saw where someone had tweeted the following quote by P. L. Debevoise, “Life begins when you get out of the grandstand into the game.”

    Life is a challenge. We face adversity and discouraging circumstances regularly as we walk through it, and we are brought repeatedly to situations that test our mettle. In my own life, I am broadly aware of how easy it is to meet challenges with fears and doubts that call me toward my comfort, and not into the fray of living, of living for.

    And yet, the only life worth living is a life lived for.

    Like the Dillon Panthers, we may face contests in life that test our character and demand extreme endurance from us- and in the end, we may find, or feel, that after the battle, we have come up short. We have not, though, if in the forays we face we engage life, we pour ourselves into the effort, and we pour ourselves out for the advancing of something greater than ourselves.

    The full life is found in a life of love, and a life lived in love demands nothing less than leaving everything you have on the field as you live each day. And the only way you can leave everything on the field day by day is to make the choice in your life, once and for all, to give up your seat in the grandstands and to never go back to it.

    About

    A web programmer by day, I somehow still spend a lot of time thinking about relationships, God, and the significance of grace and love in daily events. I am old school in the sense that I believe in the reality of sin, and in the need of each human heart for deliverance to the Divine. I am one of those who believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that you can find most answers to life's pressing issues in Him and His Word, the Bible. I ain't perfect, and a lot of the time I ain't good, but by God's grace and kindness, I am forgiven and free.

    Leave a Reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

    This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.