The Art of Losing Well
Last night my basketball team lost in a single elimination playoff game. If you know me, you know I like this as much as I like watching my sister in laws dog for 5 weeks. We didn’t play well, and it was quite frustrating, but there was a bright side, a proverbial lesson to be learned.
One thing I’ve learned in my 10 +years of doing what I do is that you can’t win all the time and sometimes you lose, but how you lose can be just as important to your natural growth as a person than actually winning all the time. The person who wins all the time isn’t mature, for they can’t understand what it is to feel loss, and to know loss is to grow up in ways that winning can’t provide. So here is just one of a few thought I had on losing well fresh off our playoff loss last night:
If you’re going to lose, lose with a great team. I can’t tell you I enjoyed losing last night, but I can tell you it will be that much easier to play again because of the group of guys I play ball with. There are teams in our league that have killed us in the past, and they’ve bickered back and forth about everything – and the next year they were on a different team. There were a few years at Fellowship when my predecessor made some hard decisions and things were really lean for a while people wise, which of course led to hard financial struggle. After feeling the joys of winning before, this felt like losing. But we were able to walk through those difficulties because we enjoyed working together through those valleys. Last night’s playoff loss produced a bitter tasting puddle in my mouth, but thankfully I love to play with the group of guys I play with each week, so on to next season. Interestingly enough, this is also one of the reasons I love being at Fellowship now as the lead pastor. The last two years haven’t always been peaches, but I’ve walked with some truly wonderful compadres, and this makes all the difference in the world.
Now, if I could just find a bright side to dog sitting, we’d be all set.
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