In college I was a goalie. We were a big enough program and fortunate enough that we, the goalies, got our very own coach to give us one-on-one, specific attention. The rest of the team ran sprints and we worked on ladders, plyo boxes, and getting up quick off the ground. The rest of the team worked on foot skills as we perfected our hands and our diving. The rest of the team learned how to float a nice ball through the air and we learned how to read it and how to shove any of those other people out of our way to get there. We were very trained, very programmed to be goalies first and that meant having a very different perspective and read on the game. We spent hours everyday standing just in front of a line, a large metal box behind us and someone coming at us with a ball at their feet. We spent hours a day repeatedly learning how to read the ball, how to position our bodies, how to position our defenders, how to communicate accurately so that that little ball would not get past us. And, when it did, we’d get back up and start replaying the whole thing in our mind to figure out what went wrong, what we possibly could have done different to make sure it would be a save next time and we had a coach there to assist us in figuring this out.
As I step back and look at this it would seem quite possible that we could, and quite honestly probably have at some point in our past, played a great game, just been on fire making 14 spectacular saves and reading the game well, communicating well and then make one minor mistake that turns in to a goal. At the end of the game we could, and have, walk away from that game thinking, “I failed, my entire purpose was to keep that ball out of the net and it went in.” You see we can so easily merely focused on our aspect of the game, we were goalies so we had one main vision: don’t let the ball get past you. My goalie coach was definitely always trying to teach me how to keep the ball out of the back of the net, that was the point, BUT if I allowed myself to get too focused on this specific big vision I may easily miss out on the fact that my team also has an offense. My team also has a well-trained nucleus at the other end trying to get the ball in the back of the other team’s net. And if I lose sight of the big picture and get too focused just on my vision I may miss the fact that, though I did let in one goal, my team scored 2 goals and thus we won! In the big picture it’s a victory but if I get too caught up on my specifics I may miss this altogether. After all my vision was to not let a goal in but the overall objective and big picture for the team (which would include me) is to win.
Though my coach spent everyday at practicing teaching me and training me to keep the ball out of the back of the net at the end of the day that is just the vision, she, along with the head coach, never thought I’d keep it out of the net every time, they knew it’d go in sometimes, but they still gave me the bigger vision to aim at. At the end of the games where I played like I stated above, on fire, my coach never came up to me and looked at me with disappointment, they saw the good, they saw the big picture and all of the successes in my endeavor to achieve the vision and the overall team objective being attained. In life we so often get caught up on the vision, it becomes the only thing that we see. We forget to look at the big picture and embrace the successes. Jesus laid out a compelling vision for each of us, he doesn’t expect us to achieve it perfectly, but he does ask that we walk towards it. He does ask that we don’t look at perfection as the overall goal and thus let fear encroach on our willingness to try. Like my coaches, He knows we won’t achieve it perfectly and that isn’t His aim anyways, he knows that what we do accomplish will be beautiful and he desires to rejoice with us as we push and walk towards it. He gives us vision not as something to be attained but as something that gets us walking in the right direction as he guides every step we take.
No comments:
Post a Comment