Winning While Losing

You are play­ing on a team that is twenty points behind, and it is the final minute of the game. You have a bet­ter atti­tude than those with the supe­rior score. You love the sport for the sport itself and have had fun. In God’s mea­sure of things, you are win­ning the game.

The econ­omy takes a down­turn. Your pay is less, while the costs of things con­tinue to rise. You sim­plify your life and redis­cover the “lilies of the field and the birds of the air.” You are thus rich again. While your check­ing account dwin­dles, you find new friends and new ways to have fun. You detach from the seri­ous­ness of life and actu­ally dis­cover that “a person’s worth is not in the abun­dance of his or her possessions.”

Jesus said, “The first will be last and the last will be first.” He had a way of show­ing us all how to win, while it super­fi­cially appears that we are los­ing. He turned his own death into a gate­way to eter­nal life. His ene­mies thought they had won. His win­ning atti­tude was to pray for them, for­give them, and thus escape the grave.

Life is a game that you can­not win. Your body has con­spired to end the game in the favor of death. You are play­ing a game you will inevitably lose — at least until you learn how to win while los­ing. Since you can­not buy immor­tal­ity, you find it through cre­ative avenues. The best med­i­cine in the world can­not keep you alive for­ever. Atti­tude (spirit) tran­scends the worst cir­cum­stances. You win the game by ris­ing above it. This life is lived for its own sake then released for the life to come.