Winners

Both the Sully Buttes Chargers and the Potter County Battlers won their district volleyball tournaments.  They played each other in the regional tournament on Tuesday, which Sully Buttes won.  Both the Sully Buttes Chargers and the Potter County Battlers reached the semi-finals in the state football playoffs.  That’s some pretty good seasons by our local sports teams.

This success is wonderful, of course.  But it got me thinking about sports and the importance we place on them.  You all know that I love sports.  But I’ll be the first to admit that we can make them too important in our lives.  We are, after all, talking about something that we’re supposed to do for fun, for entertainment.  Yes, there are some people who make their living from sports, and that obviously makes it more important for them.  But for the rest of us, sports are simply supposed to be for enjoyment.  They’re a pleasant diversion, a distraction from the problems of our lives.

We can still root for our teams, of course.  That’s especially true when we’re talking about small-town high school sports, where we know some of the kids and know some of their families.  We have kids from our churches involved in those games, and we have other kids whom we know, or whose parents or grandparents we know.  It’s only natural that we should want them to do well, and that we should want their teams to win.

But of course, there are other people in other towns.  And there are people who know those kids and their families.  There are people who go to church with those kids, and who know their parents or grandparents.  And they want their kids to do well, and what their kids’ teams to win, just as much as we want our kids to do well and our kids’ teams to win.

The thing about sports, though, is that everybody cannot win.  In every game, somebody wins and somebody loses.  It’s a lot of fun to win, and it’s never any fun to lose.  One of the lessons sports teaches us, though, is that in life we’re not always going to win.  Sometimes, we’re going to lose.  We won’t always have things go our way.  We won’t always get the things we want.  We need to learn how to handle that, and how to come back next time and try again.

However, there’s one area of life in which one person winning does not mean someone else loses.  That’s our faith in God, and our belief in Jesus as our Savior.  One person having faith does not mean someone else cannot have faith.  In fact, the goal is for all of us to have faith.  The goal is for all of us to “win” with God.  The goal is for all of us to get the championship trophy.  For a Christian, that trophy is feeling God’s Spirit with us on earth and then going to be with God in heaven.

There have to be losers in sports, but we can all be winners with God.  All we need to do is believe in God and accept Jesus as our Savior.  When we do that, we’ve won.  And then, we can do all we can to help other people win, too.