I Cannot Watch The Sport I Played

The game goes on and within about four minutes you have found a reason to be somewhere else.

You do not announce it. You get up to check something. You go and stand in the kitchen. You come back at the end and ask who won and you sound perfectly normal.

Your family have half noticed. One of them asked once, and you said something about not really following it any more, which is not a lie exactly, and it is not the truth.

The truth is that you cannot watch people doing the thing you did.

You gave that sport eleven years. You were good. Not famous, not remarkable, but genuinely good in the way that means your body knew things that most bodies do not know, and knew them without asking.

And now you are a person who watches, and you have discovered that you cannot even do that.

Everybody has told you the same three sentences. That you had a great run. That you can still enjoy it. That you should coach. And all three of them are about managing the loss, and not one of them is about the thing itself.

So this article does not do that. This article is about getting the thing itself back into your hands for ten minutes, in a form that has nothing to do with competing.

They which run in a race

There is a line about running that Paul uses to make a point about something else, and the picture underneath it is worth taking seriously in its own right.

Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain. (1 Corinthians 9:24, King James Version)

Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize. So run, that you may obtain.

Notice the first four words of the description. They which run in a race run all.

You have a verse here that puts the running before the winning, and 1 Corinthians 9:24 has never once described the field as people who failed. The sentence says they all run, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person moving long after the prize has stopped being the point.

You were in that field for eleven years and you know what that line is describing. Everybody in a race runs. Almost nobody wins. And every single one of them is doing the same thing with their body as the one who does.

The prize is a real thing in the passage and Paul is not sentimental about it. But the running is not a means to the prize here. It is the thing being observed, and it belongs to everyone in the field.

And then, four verses later, he says something that people quote much less often, which is that he keeps his own body under and brings it into subjection, as an ordinary continuing practice, in a man who is not competing in any race at all.

You are able to keep the practice without the competition, and the written word has never once made the second one the reason for the first. First Corinthians 9:24 puts all the runners in the same motion, and the Spirit of God is the one who returns something to a person's hands after the season for it has passed.

Which is exactly what has been taken from you, and it was not taken by your body. It was taken by a category error.

You lost the competing, not the sport

Here is what actually happened, and the distinction is everything.

You stopped being able to compete. That is real and it is not coming back in the form it had.

You are grieving one part of a thing and have handed back the whole of it, and nothing in 1 Corinthians 9 has ever once required that trade. The verse describes a whole field running, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a loss from everything that got thrown out with it.

What went was the competition, the level, the standard you held yourself to, the version where it mattered how you did. What did not go is the shape of the movement, the feel of it in your hands, the particular pleasure your body takes in doing this specific thing, which is unlike any other pleasure and which you have not had for years.

You gave away the second because you lost the first, and nobody asked you to.

And you did it because being bad at the thing you were once good at is intolerable, and doing it badly in front of people is worse. That is not vanity. That is a real and specific pain and I am not going to talk you out of it either.

You have a body that still knows how to do this, and being unable to do it at the old level has never once erased what it knows. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in a movement a body learned twenty years ago, and 1 Corinthians 9:24 says of every runner in the field that they run.

So the assignment is designed around that pain, not against it.

Ten minutes of the plainest version

Here is the assignment.

Go outside with the ball, or the racket, or the shoes, and do the plainest version of the thing for ten minutes.

You are able to do this at the lowest possible level without it being an admission of anything, and doing so has never once been a smaller act than what you used to do. It is written that they which run in a race run all, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a driveway with a woman doing something badly on purpose.

The plainest version. Not a game. Not a session. Not with anybody who saw you play.

If it was a ball sport, it is you and a ball against a wall. If it was running, it is a slow ten minutes on a road with no watch. If it was a racket, it is you and one other person hitting it back and forth badly with no score.

Ten minutes. Nobody keeping count. And this is the important part: take one of your children.

Not a peer. Not somebody who remembers. A child, who will be terrible at it, and who has no reference point for how good you were and will simply be delighted that you can do this at all.

You have a child who has never once seen you at your best, and to that child what you can still do today is remarkable rather than diminished. First Corinthians 9:24 puts the whole field in the running, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person be seen doing something badly by somebody who loves them.

That is the whole design. The child removes the comparison, because the child was never in the room for the version you are comparing yourself to.