Overcomer

 March 3, 2022

Linda and I spent the evening in the bleachers cheering on our granddaughter’s basketball team in their semifinals. Sadly for us, they lost a squeaker. There was a terrible call at the end of the game which in all likelihood would have changed the outcome. On the other hand, the team gave up a first quarter lead with a second quarter when despite their best efforts, they couldn’t get the ball in the hoop.

When our children were little, I thought my main job as a father was to protect them from harm and even disappointment. A few of life’s hard realities soon divested me of that notion, and I realized instead that the most important thing I could teach my children was how to overcome adversity and injustice. I couldn’t prevent bad things from happening and hurting, but if I didn’t teach them how to come back from defeat, to overcome evil, to pick themselves up when life beat them down, I would have failed them as their father. 

There were times when like all children, they complained that we weren’t fair in our decisions. “Life isn’t fair,” we countered. “Get used to it.” It seems today that we are raising a generation that expects fairness and wilts into a puddle of despair, tears, and tantrums when they get sucker-punched by reality. I wish life were fair, but wishing doesn’t make it so. 

I suppose in one sense, it’s a good thing life isn’t fair. The Bible tells us that all have sinned and come short of God’s glory (Romans 3:23), that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), but that God took on himself the penalty and judgment that we deserved in order to set us free and give us life (Romans 58). If God were completely fair, I would still be in my sins, without hope, and without a future, but as it is, instead of fairness, God chose mercy and grace. 

I truly wish tonight’s outcome had been different; that these girls don’t have to lay their heads down on their pillows tonight bitter for what might have been, but even more, I hope they don't let this defeat defeat them. I hope and pray that one way or another, they will learn what it means not just to win, but even more, to become overcomers.