Once there was a coach who told an unlikely bobsledder, “A gold medal is a wonderful thing, but if you’re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it.”
If you haven’t seen Cool Runnings–well, I guess we know what you’re doing this weekend. It’s good for a laugh, a profound life lesson, and maybe even some tears if you’re as bad as me. Something about a mismatched team of valiant Jamaicans carrying their wrecked bobsled over the finish line puts a lump in my throat.
The Team That Was Enough Without It
The story follows bobsledding hopefuls Derice Bannock, Sanka Coffie, Yul Brenner, and Junior Bevil on a humorous journey from an unpromising start in Jamaica to the Olympics in Calgary, where, notwithstanding a series of fumbles and misfortunes, they rise to become legitimate competition for gold.
The night before the last race, Derice asks Coach Irv Blitzer why he cheated so many years ago to win his own Olympic gold, and that’s when Irv drops that beautiful, life-changing bombshell.
“Derice, a gold medal is a wonderful thing, but if you’re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it.”
Flying down the track the next day, a blade comes loose on the sled, tips it over, and a harrowing few seconds later, they scrape to a halt in sight of the finish line. Derice stares at it, watching all his dreams go up in smoke, I suppose, but only for a moment. Then he and the team pick up their bobsled, carry it across the finish line, and they all know they’re made of the right stuff, gold medal or not.
In the end, it was never about winning. It was about finishing the race.
Can I Be Enough Without It?
As a child, of course, Irv’s wisdom was lost on me, but as a single adult eyeing my own sort of gold medal, it whacked me over the head.
A husband is a wonderful thing, but if I’m not enough without him, I’ll never be enough with him.
Truer words were never spoken. As surely as I knew I was counting on my husband to fix everything wrong with my life, I knew that, wonderful as he’d be, he’d probably still let me down sometimes. And I’d sometimes disappoint him. The love might be deep, but occasionally the like could get precarious. Then what?
I have a hunch I wouldn’t feel like enough anymore. Placing your faith in a gold medal works until it gets tarnished, and then you just get tarnished with it.
None of this made Irv’s words easy to swallow, though. Enough without marriage? Was that really possible? Should it be possible? With a Bible full of verses about how important it is? God didn’t say, “It is not good that the man should be alone,” for no reason.
Which also made it hard to swallow the assurance I so often heard regarding single Christians that Jesus was all we needed. Now, hear me out before you stone me for blasphemy because I am not saying I don’t need Jesus. I need Jesus!
But if he was all I needed, why did I still feel empty?
One night, I told Heavenly Father it was no use. “I don’t feel complete without my husband.”
And the words came quietly to my mind, “That’s exactly how you should feel.”
It’s taken years to reconcile that with, “Jesus is all you need,” but finally it’s come clear that being enough is not the same as being complete.
The Difference Between Complete and Enough
If I never marry, that’s an entire spectrum of human experience I will never know. A giant piece of life that will always be missing. No one calls a puzzle with missing pieces complete, so how can a life with missing people be so? Jesus or not, they are missing. And he knows that.
This is the gospel of holey lives (yes, I spelled that right) according to Heather, so you can take it or leave it, but I believe Jesus honors the places our loved ones hold in our hearts–even the ones we haven’t met. He respects their roles in our lives. After all, he created those roles–husband, wife, father, mother, daughter, son–and he designed us to want to fill them. It isn’t good to be alone, and I shouldn’t feel complete that way. For whatever reason, I’m still that way anyway, but Jesus knows the hurt that causes. It’s valid. He sees the empty places, and he honors the rights of my husband and children to fill them, the same as he honors the place I still hope to fill in their lives.
But in return, he expects me to honor his place. Just as he can’t be my husband, my husband cannot be my savior. Neither can my children. And I can’t be theirs. Should we ever be together, we may pull each other over a few finish lines. We may be each other’s reward at the end of many a race. But only one person can take us across that most important finish line between mortality and eternal life. “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”
Complete or not, if one day I come unto the Father through Christ–that’s where enough comes in.
A Crown of Righteousness
I might approach the finish line of this race called life in a broken, tipped over bobsled. Sometimes I think that’s what I started in. The ride may be bumpy. It already has been. I probably won’t take all the turns as gracefully as I should. Some have already exposed the worst in me. And I may be minus a few gold medals I’d hoped the race would yield. That will be a disappointment.
But it will be a greater disappointment if I can’t say, like Paul, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness.”
So, instead of sitting in my wrecked bobsled waiting for something to change, missing the life ahead of me because the life I’m in doesn’t look like what I planned, I think I’ll just pick it up and walk onward. Because a gold medal is a wonderful thing, but a crown of righteousness? That’s worth finishing the race for. And the good news is, God doesn’t care how I get there. He doesn’t care how many times I tip over, how sloppy the turns are, how bad I am at driving my proverbial bobsled. He just wants me to get there. As much as I want to tell him I kept the faith, he wants to say, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.“
I have kept the faith.
Well done.
Crown of righteousness.
That’s what enough looks like.
Actually, I think complete looks like that, too. In the next life, anyway, they’re not so different.
Occasionally weep deeply over the life you hoped would be. Grieve the losses. Then wash your face. Trust God. And embrace the life you have.
John Piper
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Heather I am very touched by your words. There are many ways to be fruitful in this life and your insight and wisdom show you are bearing good fruit. I know what you are saying is true although I see it through the lens of widowhood. I know the important thing is that we bear good fruit no matter what our situation or stage of life is. God will fill in all empty places
Thank you! I’ve never thought of this in terms of bearing fruit, but what a nice thought for someone who’s felt like such a barren tree! There’s certainly more than one kind of fruit, more than one way to bear it, and we probably have a lot more of it than we realize.