Sunday Sentiments

I love the Olympics, and I'm so happy they are back! Ryan and I were on duty Friday night, but I was so grateful it was a quiet night in WillowBridge, and I was able to take my work to the couch and multi-task! Opening ceremonies and notes...all at the same time. 

I was pleasantly surprised at the ceremonies. It was definitely strange to see such a massive stadium with empty seats, but I still loved watching the parade of nations and all the pageantry. Yesterday we kept coverage running on our TV, so we could catch bits and pieces as we ran in and out of the apartment between work projects. 

It was during one of those run-through breaks that I heard about athletes who had to forfeit their competition, because after they made it all the way to Japan, they had a positive test and had to withdraw.

That made me think of something I heard a few weeks ago at church. Our pastor did an entire series on lamenting, and throughout the series, he interviewed people within the church who had lamented a loss of some kind in life. His last interview was his own daughter. She's a teenager now, but as a very young child, he and his wife enrolled her in swim lessons and found out she was actually an extraordinary swimmer. 

She spent her entire childhood competing and was actually on track to appear at the very Olympic games we are watching on TV right now. But a few years ago, what started as an apparent strained muscle ended up becoming a mysterious, still-not-fully-understood injury that not only knocked her out of Olympic contention, but it knocked her out of swimming entirely. She lives in daily pain at high levels.

She spoke articulately and candidly about her disappointment and hurt over letting go of her biggest dream. She shared about the lessons God taught her in that time, helping her see that swimming was just one part of her whole life, but He had different plans for her.

I thought about that young woman and the dreams that took her away from a moment in time she hoped to know. I thought about the athletes who actually did make it to the games, only to be unable to compete because of illness. I thought about athletes who made it to the games and WILL compete, but one little mistake that never ever happens to them...happens. Right in that all-important moment.

The bottom line is that all of us can work so hard toward something specific in our lives, only to find our dreams dashed in the big moment. We can be tempted to see ourselves as failures and label our lives as a loss, but none of that is true.

Absolutely - those moments are difficult and disappointing. But those moments are just a piece of a much bigger life. God does so much with, through, and for us every single day. THOSE are the moments that matter the most. Even if we never get our one dream moment, the moments that string together to make up the rest of our lives do matter.

Maybe you're mourning something today. Maybe you're grieving something you had to let go of before you were ready or without the results you hoped. It's okay to mourn and grieve. But don't write off your life or purpose. God has so much more for you!!