No Crying!

Hope deferred makes the heart sick. But desire fulfilled is a tree of life.
Proverbs 13:12

Watching the American Olympics team last night as one of the gymnast failed to successfully mount the balance beam in a finals round of team competition I was reminded of one of my favorite movie quotes. It was the response of Tom Hanks as a reluctant coach of a woman’s baseball team in the movie A League of Their Own responding to a female player who burst into tears at his harsh criticism. “Crying? There’s no crying in baseball!”

This young woman, who had trained her entire life for a time such as this, had the pressure of going out and scoring big for Team USA. It was the event for which she was most qualified, a world leader in the balance beam. The plan was for her to perform a complex mount and go immediately into an acrobatic skill. Everything went as planned except that one small problem that she missed her footing on the mount and fell off the beam.

Personally, knowing that billions of people across the world had just witnessed my failure to achieve what I had flawlessly accomplished in training countless times, my response might have been to run off stage and hide as quickly as I could. She didn’t. She mounted the balance beam and proceeded to complete her performance, knowing that her mistake had probably just cost the team the gold medal. And, she didn’t cry. But you could see that she wanted to.

Then, as if that wouldn’t make your day bad enough, on the next round in the floor exercises she fell again. Then, she stepped out of bounds. And, it wasn’t like she was able to make all those mistakes in privacy. The entire world watched, winced, and wondered how an athlete at that level of competition could make such mistakes. (As if any of us could actually get near a balance beam ourselves without falling.)

She wasn’t alone in her mistakes. Several other members on the team made mistakes themselves. The hope of yet another Team USA gold medal at this Olympics was deferred. And, the demeanor on the faces of they young women made it apparent that they were heart sick.
One of the most interesting things to me about the Olympics is that the competitions are so incredibly close. There are world records being knocked down right and left. Swimmers are breaking world records and still losing the races. The time difference between a winner and a loser is measured in fractions of seconds or fractions of points.

In life, the difference between being perceived as a winner or a loser may not be as close as it is in the Olympics. However, perceptions can be dangerous. Some of the most highly trained athletes in the world leave the Olympics as “failures” in the eyes of the world because of their performance. Forgotten is the time and effort spent training and preparing for these events. Forgotten is the self-discipline and dedication it requires to reach this level of competition. Forgotten is the truth that God may teach us far more in failure than in success.

Never, never, never let your feelings of success or failure be dictated by the opinions of other people. How you feel about your performance should always be determined by how your performance lined up with what God called you to do.

Duty is ours, results are God’s.