A great majority of people all over the world love to watch the Olympics. Amazing feats of strength and endurance and raw skill amaze and amuse.
Unbelievable feats of strength and endurance show itself in unusual areas. In 1998 Benoit Lecomte swam across the Atlantic Ocean in 73 days and covered 3,716 miles (and we thought a swim from Cuba to Florida was tough). At the 2010 Wimbledon championship tennis match between Josh Isner and Nicolas Mahut lasted 11 hours (longest tennis match in history). Tom Sietas, a deep sea diving expert from Germany dove 700 feet without any oxygen or assistance. It’s amazing how he got so deep without a breath of air, much less how he got back to the top? Usain Bolt ran the 100-meter dash in 9.58 seconds (top speed of close to 31 mph. or 4.28 steps per second). That’s fast! Amazing, indeed! There are thousands of individual feats.
There are a few team sports where the group competes as one, but for the most part it is one individual performing to their utmost capacity and hoping the judges are completely unbiased and fair. Some sports are removed from the judge’s observation, oversight and biases. It’s strictly the best and fastest wins the prize. Take swimming for example, every competitor leaps off a platform and when they finish that last stroke, they touch an electronic pad at the pool’s end and a highly accurate clock records the time the swimmer completed his laps.
Many of you remember that one race that went down in the history books. About a dozen swimmers were racing for the gold medal, and then before long two swimmers were ahead of the rest and the race was between two men. One was named Mike and the other was named Milorad. The final lap was approaching and nobody else was going to catch them. It was like watching two sharks cutting through the water effortlessly. Ten yards to go, five, then mere feet, then it happened – they both finished simultaneously – or so it appeared. In fact one swimmer finished a hundredth of a second ahead of the other swimmer! You may remember Michael Phelps’s race against Milorad Cavic in the 2008 Olympics. It earned him seven gold’s!
Very few of us are Olympic swimmers or even swimmers for that matter. The Bible has lots of stories about people winning and coming in second place. Is the race the most important thing in life? The writer of Ecclesiastes tells us that, “The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.” (Ecclesiastes 9:11)
What happens in life is quite unpredictable. No one can predict success or foresee how God will deal with them. Simply run the race as best you can.
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