Minutes of Meetings with God and with Myself
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Losing and Winning ...

The phone rang. It was a politician on the line. This was not one of those hated "vote for me" calls. It was our dearest friend calling to tell us how her race for the Indiana State House had gone. I already knew how the vote had gone. She had lost in a very close race. I had been working on a funeral service until after midnight, and (just before I crashed into bed) had checked the election results as the vote count progressed. Then my friend was only about 100 votes behind. When I got up the next morning, about 6:30, I checked the results again. In the final count, she had lost by 4%. Less than 700 votes had put the office back into the hands of the incumbent. She was obviously disappointed and terribly tired from the hard campaign and almost 3 days with next to no sleep; but, as we talked, she clearly was not letting herself feel like some horrible loser. She expressed a strong sense that she had come so very far in her self-awareness, in her personal growth and in her ability to relate to others. Despite her fatigue, there was this new and strong feeling of being alive and doing something important that still empowered her conversation as she described to me the last leg of her race for public office. By the time our phone call was done, I had a notion that my friend would not be content to just go back to the way her life had been before. After lots of sleep, she would be re-charged to go out and work to change the world for the better. Not only was her life changed, but her husband's was, too. An hour or so later that evening, he and I talked, friend to friend, on the phone at some length, too. Again, despite his fatigue (he had really thrown himself into his wife's campaign investing lots of time and energy), there was this new and strong feeling of being alive and doing something important that still empowered his conversation as he described what he had seen and done in the last 72 hours of the campaign. Once again, by the time our phone call was done, I had a notion that my friend would not be content to just go back to the way his life had been before. After lots of sleep, he, too, would be re-charged to go out and work to change the world for the better. The phone conversations started me thinking. My friends had put so much of themselves into their effort and still had not made their goal. Does not achieving the end for which they started mean that the whole enterprise was worthless or wasted? Is winning the most important thing? Mostly our culture assumes that winning, that achieving the goal is, indeed, everything. We also assume that "the end" justifies almost any "means". It will be extremely interesting to see how our most recent presidential election works itself out since both top candidates obviously want to win so badly. How much will the nation have to suffer socially, politically and economically to decide "who wins"? Simply because our culture is so focused on achievement, talking about anything else but winning and what it takes to win gets considered as desperate rationalizations by "losers." However, there are more than a few occasions in which winning does as much or more harm than good. Often, those who win, those who achieve their goal, get shackled by their victory. The strength that brought them what they wanted becomes their greatest weakness. The winners get caught in the web of what they did to get what they wanted. The process that people go through and the "means" people use to attain their goals are at least as important and, frequently, more important than the achievements and goals for which they strive. How can the process be so very important? The process is merely the "means" to the "end," right? Actually, the process that we go through to achieve our goals, to win, is our discovery and our expres-sion of the very core of who we are as humans. Jesus put it this way: "The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks." (Luke 6:45 NIV) Our goal, our vision for victory is not the full extent of who we are. How we pursue our goal, the way we win our victory says as much or more about us, good or bad. I am extremely proud of my friend for running for political office. She made that choice to do something concrete to make life in her community better. She consciously decided that her life had to be less talk and more action. I am even more proud of her because of her new vibrance, her new self- awareness, and her new maturity as a compassion-ate, confident and Christian leader. Her values are clearer and she has a greater sense of what she can and cannot do. She did not win the election. But the process she has gone through has liberated her and become the opportunity for her to discover many of her gifts and graces. We tend to learn the most from losing, from not reaching our goal. Sometimes the lessons are extremely difficult and hurt terribly. Christians, in particular, are in a position to have the greatest kind of appreciation for the value of losing, the lessons that can be learned, and the astounding ways that the Creator can take present defeats and use them as preparation for the most amazing sorts of victories in the future. The life, death and Resurrection of Jesus is pregnant with lessons. Most of those closest to Jesus were probably like to two who walked the road to Emmaus on Resurrection Sunday. About Jesus, they thought: "He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people ... we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel." (Luke 24:18-21 NIV) Jesus seemed to do everything right, but things still went terribly wrong. The goal was good and the process (the means to the end) was good. Jesus lived out a dramatic model of love in action. None-the-less, Jesus hung on the Cross. When we do not win, it is easy for us to imagine that God has abandoned us and that what we have done will go to waste. There was that moment on the Cross when even Jesus felt such overwhelming despair that he cried: "My God, my God why have you forsaken me." (Mark 15:34). Jesus found himself living and dying his worst nightmare. It has been the challenge to Christians, as the Church, to give meaning to the Cross and the crucifixion. God took that worst nightmare and used it as the occasion for accomplishing the unbelievable, the Resurrection. Jesus left the tomb, alive again. God's love ultimately triumphed over death. Even with this totally astounding help from God, we still have trouble embracing the challenge and learning the lessons. Especially hard are the lessons: sometimes you have to lose in order to win; and, no matter what, "As I [Jesus] have loved you, so you must love one another. (John 13:34 NIV)