After watching my favorite team lose yet again, I remembered a famous speech by Vince Lombardi. Every year, at the beginning of the season, he would walk into the locker room, hold up a football as if they has never seen one and say, “Gentlemen, this is a football.” He would then go over the very basics of football and lead them out to the field. He would point out the boundaries and lines on the field explains each one. He’d take them down to the goal line and let them know that their job was to get the football across it. The men had grown up playing football, but his speech was very effective because it was all about getting to the basics.
How do you and I handle defeat? How do we handle loss in our lives? There’s a lot of options to choose from. We can blame God, blame others, have a melt down, pretend it didn’t happen, rise to the challenge or any number of other ways. I like Vince Lombardi’s idea of getting back to the basics. We can complicate things beyond where they are when we try to go beyond the basics. He can take a bad situation and make it worse. Our response to bad situations is crucial to our success in overcoming it.
When I think of the basics, the first thing I think of is prayer. We typically react to a situation and pray second. If we react wrongly to the situation, we blow things up and make them worse. If we stop and pray, we have the opportunity to react out of God’s wisdom instead our our emotion. James 1:5 says, “If any of you lack wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all.” Stop, pray and ask God for wisdom in how you should respond to the situation.
The next thing I think of is to go to God’s Word. It’s full of people who faced disappointment, failure and loss. You can see how they responded and the outcomes. I’ve been reading “The Divine Mentor” by Wayne Cordeiro, and in it he talks about being mentored by people in the Bible. He doesn’t just read the Bible to check off a box, he reads it to get to know the people in the Bible and to learn from them. He sees them as mentors who can help him in whatever situation he faces. It’s helped me to look at the Bible in a different way and in turn, I’ve been getting more out of it than before.
Another basic step I can think of is to breathe. It sounds simple I know, but stop and take a breath. When everything is happening at once, stress kicks in no we start reacting in order to contain the situation. We forget to breathe. It’s important we don’t react out of emotion. We need to take that breath, survey what just happened and choose the appropriate response. That breath puts a gap of time for God to give us the wisdom we prayed for and let’s Him help our mind to recall any mentoring that we’ve received from His Word.
I know these are very basic, but that’s what we need. You may have been a Christian your whole life and have heard these things a thousand times, but we all need to be reminded of the fundamentals from time to time. It’s the fundamentals that are the foundation of everything. It’s good to go back and to look at them every now and then so we are reminded of what we know, but forget in pressure situations. They’ll help you to make the right choice in how you respond when the time comes.
Devotions by Chris Hendrix 