Medal Counts & Mighty Mites

Like many Americans, I liked tuning in to the Olympics every once in a while over the past
two weeks.  Thanks to a Nintendo DS Winter Olympics game that Eli bought, he’d developed
quite an interest in the various sports, so he & I chilled out on the sofa a different times
watching a variety of different sports. 

What I’d forgotten since the last Olympics, however, was the silly sport that newspapers & TV
anchors have made of medal counts: how many gold, silver & bronze medal each country
has amassed.  Now of course I’m delighted that hardworking, largely amateur athletes get the
thrill of  victory—and I love to see our flag raised and hear the national anthem sung (by the
few brave  American adults who actually sing it)!  

But after the national euphoria, I’m sure it’s dawned on most of us that as a contest, this
medal count thing feels like a joke.  It’s like my 13-year old son challenging my 9-year old to a
wrestling match—the outcome is always predictable.  How is it fair to compare the US medal
count to that of dinky countries like Slovenia (1/150th our size)—or, even, for that matter, our
national pseudo-suburb, Canada (1/10th our size)?

A quick Google search reveals this count:  On a per capita basis, the U.S. ends up in 19th
place, with roughly 1 medal per one million people, about the same as Poland. Canada
ranks 10th with five times the take as the USA. The top finisher was tiny Norway with 4+
medals per million. Now, to be fair to the home-team, it might be more fair to consider only the US population to those within, say 200 miles of a mountain range— then I’m sure we’d rocket up the adjusted medal ladder.  But I’ll leave that to folks with more time on their hands…

The whole idea of counting our victories and comparing ourselves to others is pretty
ingrained in our hearts. It’s part of nearly everything we do: We compare our salary to our
colleagues’, our home to our neighbors’, our parenting to the other moms in our playground
our GPA to our classmates’, and our team-standings to our buddies.  Ever since humankind
left God’s perfection  eons ago, human hearts have not only pursued healthy competition, but
also destructive materialism, petty keeping-up-with-the-Jonesism—as well as plenty of wars,
famines, and brutal regimes, too.

Counter-intuitively, Christ-followers recognize that only by allowing Jesus to be the gold-
medalist in our life that we’ll ever taste a victory that means anything.  The adventure of life
succeeds best by bowing out of our race in order to win with Jesus in His race.  A clay medal
from Christ is worth more than a gold one from Vancouver—or any earthly source.  As Paul
said this to the church at Philippians:

 The very credentials these people are waving around as something special, I'm tearing up and throwing out with the trash—along with everything else I used to take credit for. And why? Because of Christ. Yes, all the things I once thought were so important are gone from my life. Compared to the high privilege of knowing Christ Jesus as my Master, firsthand, everything I once thought I had going for me is insignificant— dog dung. I've dumped it all in the trash so that I could embrace Christ and be embraced by him. 8:7-9

This Lent may your walk with Christ be full of victories—His kind, not the world’s. 

But hey, even on a per-capita basis, we still kicked China's butt...