2 posts tagged “perseverance”
Any Given Sunday attempts to take a hard look at the Real NFL. In it, Oliver Stone and Al Pacino team up for a controversial portrayal of the unvarnished, behind-the-scene lives of the professional football player of today. I have a hunch that, in the end, they reveal more about the cynical image Hollywood has of the league than the workaday lives of the average NFL player.
The result falls short of this lofty goal, though there are moments of real brilliance. Amid its raunchy, boobalicious, B-grade elements, one finds some profound insights into the modern, human condition. These insights address our fears, our failures, and our ever-present desire to quit in the face of oppresion and impossible odds.
The greatest statement in the film comes right at the climax, where the Miami Shark's soul hangs in the balance. Al Pacino, playing the tired, battle-worn coach, speaks with a silver tongue these amazing words:
I don't know what to say really. Three minutes to the biggest battle of our professional lives all comes down to today. Either we heal as a team or we are going to crumble. Inch by inch play by play till we're finished. We are in hell right now, gentlemen believe me and we can stay here and get the sh*t kicked out of us or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb out of hell. One inch, at a time.
***
You know when you get old in life things get taken from you. That's, that's part of life. But, you only learn that when you start losing stuff. You find out that life is just a game of inches. So is football. Because in either game life or football the margin for error is so small. I mean one half step too late or to early you don't quite make it. One half second too slow or too fast and you don't quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They are in ever break of the game every minute, every second.
On this team, we fight for that inch On this team, we tear ourselves, and everyone around us to pieces for that inch. We CLAW with our finger nails for that inch. Cause we know when we add up all those inches that's going to make the f****ing difference between WINNING and LOSING between LIVING and DYING.
***
Inch by inch. The inches we need are everywhere around us. Where does a person summon the strength to attack and conquer these inches? The inch to stay in a marriage? To get up and go to work one more day? To stay away from the bottle? The knife? The anger? The fear? The loneliness?
The coach answers the question of where by pointing the weary players to one another--to the team. "Either we live as a team or we die as a team," he says. And he's right. Strength to endure comes from community; it is part of our nature.
But why community? Is the ultimate hope of humanity man himself? With hope that shallow, we ought to be ashamed to call it hope at all. Ultimately, endurance in community derives from the transcendent character of a communal, Triune God, who the ancient writer, Moses, described in prayer as being "from everlasting, to everlasting."
We find strength in one another, on our teams, in our families, churches, schools, neighborhoods, to endure because He Himself endures. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in perfect community, in perfect unity, is both the ground and source of our endurance.
I love Christmas. Its like an old friend: it has its faults, to be sure, but when you’re reunited with her after not seeing her for a while, all you can think about is catching up on an old conversation. Then, of course, after the first glow, reality sets in and we have to reckon with the darker side of our relationship: busy schedules, traffic, stretched budgets, and, for some of us, reminders old heart aches and breaks.
Since then our reality so rarely doesn’t live up to the rhetoric, it is good to be encouraged to hang in there and persevere in keeping Jesus, the Christ in the holiday, front and center in our otherwise often conflicted and confused thoughts and feelings during this time of year.
Who better to bring that reminder than Old Simeon, a first century Jewish prophet whose perseverance through years and years of waiting finally paid off? Who better than Simeon, ancient visionary to whom God Himself had spoken.
God’s message to the old Mystic, Simeon, was something like being told, “Mr. Henry, you’re the proud father of a brand new baby boy! But I’m not going to tell you when. Just hang out in the hospital waiting room for the next thirty years; it’ll eventually happen.”
Simeon would see with his own eyes the Redeemer that God’s people had hoped for for thousands of years: the Savior of the World. But he didn’t know when.
What would this have been like?
Day after day, Simeon, a loyal God-listener went to the Jewish temple checking his mailbox for the message that God’s Good Word had finally arrived.
What did he say when the package finally arrived? Read it for yourself, from Luke 2. Read it carefully and you can almost taste the relief in his soul; it is palpable:
29 “Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace,
according to your word;
30 for my eyes have seen your salvation
31 that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,
32 a light for revelation to the Gentiles,
and for glory to your people Israel.”
