After the Gold

Have you been watching the Olympics?  I have, when I can, which I guess won’t come as a surprise to you.  Most people know what a sports fan I am, and so it’s pretty natural that I’d be interested in the Olympics.

I was watching the gymnastics the other night.  There’s a young woman in the gymnastics named Simone Biles.  She won four gold medals and a bronze medal.  She’s nineteen years old, and she’s the greatest female gymnast in the world.  Some say she may be the greatest female gymnast ever.

That’s a pretty amazing thing, of course.  And I know she’s worked very hard, and trained very hard, to accomplish this.  Yes, she has some natural ability, too, but all the natural ability in the world won’t do you any good if you don’t develop it.  I’m sure Simone Biles has put in many long days for many years in order to achieve what she’s achieved.

But here’s the thought that occurred to me.  Suppose you were Simone Biles.  You’ve been working all of your life to achieve a goal.  And now you’ve achieved it.  And obviously, you’re incredibly happy.  But at some point, the incredible joy of that moment is going to fade.  And the question becomes, now what?

I don’t mean this to in any way diminish what she has achieved.  She set an extremely high goal, and she achieved it.  That’s awesome.  It’s just that, well, at nineteen, you’ve still got a heck of a lot of your life ahead of you.  Somehow, in some way, she’s going to have to re-orient her life.  She’s going to have to find some other goal.  She’s going to have to figure out some other thing to center her life around. 

That thing may be in the field of gymnastics, or it may be in something entirely different.  I don’t know anything about her, other than that she’s an incredible gymnast, so I have no idea what it might be.  I don’t know if she knows what it might be, or if she’s even really thought about it very much yet.  But if she hasn’t, at some point she’s going to need to.  The only alternative is to sit around and try to re-live past glory the rest of your life, and I’m sure she realizes that’s no way to live.

It’s not just Simone Biles that this applies to, of course.  You could say the same of Michael Phelps, for example.  Phelps is thirty-one, which is substantially older than nineteen, but he still has an awful lot of life ahead of him and is going to have to find something other than being a star swimmer to center that life around.

As I thought about that, I thought about how God calls all of us to serve God in some way.  But the thing is, that way may change over time.  At one time, God called me to be a lawyer.  Now, God has called me to be a pastor.  In the future, God may call me to do something else, I don’t know.  I hope not—I love what I do—but we never know when or where God may call us.

It’s the same for you.  The way you serve God has probably changed over the years, too.  You cannot do some things now that you could do before.  But you can do other things now that you could not do before.  And as long as we are on earth, we are still called to serve God in some way.

Simone Biles may have been called by God to be a great gymnast.  Michael Phelps may have been called by God to be a great swimmer.  But as they get older, God will call them to be something else.  I pray that they will be open to where God calls them.  I pray that you and I will be open to where God calls us, too.