Winning and Losing

Win­ning and los­ing are rel­a­tive. There is more to it than cross­ing the fin­ish line first. The real mir­a­cles are often the ones well back in the pack — the ones that run with the great­est lim­i­ta­tions — the ones that over­come the great­est obsta­cles just to be there.

Sylvester Stal­lone ended the great Rocky series with Rocky los­ing his last fight. Yet because he lost the fight to some­one almost half his age, he was seen as the real win­ner. The amaz­ing thing about that last film was the amount of hope it brought to aging baby boomers. “We still have it!” That is the mes­sage. Some­times win­ning means just run­ning the race one more time — no mat­ter how far back you fin­ish.

In the eyes of the Roman sol­diers, and the var­i­ous reli­gious and gov­ern­men­tal fig­ures that put Jesus on his cross, Jesus was a real loser. He could walk on water but not avoid being caught and exe­cuted. His mot­ley band of fol­low­ers could not fight their way out of a wet paper bag. In the end, Jesus beats them at their death game, and his fol­low­ers go on to have Uni­ver­si­ties, Hos­pi­tals, and Sem­i­nar­ies named after them all over the world. Their names are on land masses that they never saw. Some peo­ple even pray in their name and wear jew­elry in their honor. No one remem­bers the names of the ones that put Jesus on the cross — other than Herod and Pilate (and their names are spo­ken in deri­sion).

To this day, I am not sure how to define the win­ning life. I know how the world around me defines it: youth, good looks, pop­u­lar­ity, power, wealth, intelligence…ad nau­sea. It is the same list over and over again. Lately I have been bump­ing into some win­ners with poor health, low income, com­mon looks, too young or too old, and always in the “wrong” part of the world. Noth­ing hangs on their wall to tell them how suc­cess­ful they are. Their names never make the paper. Jesus refers to them as his “lit­tle ones” and con­sid­ers them the real win­ners.

The first will be last and the last will be first. God alone knows who gets the gold medal. You may think that your life is a fail­ure, but that is only because you do not know the hid­den meta­phys­i­cal rules to the game. The fin­ish line is in the heart, not at the end of the road.