Every time the Olympics are on I start thinking about Cool Runnings. Cool Runnings is one of my favorite movies of all time.
If you haven’t ever seen it (and I really think you should), the movie is about the first Jamaican bobsled team in 1988. Three of the men on the team are Jamaican qualifying sprinters who don’t make it, and get the idea to go to the Olympics as bobsledders instead. They find a coach, raise funds, and end up at the qualifiers. Their coach becomes a bit of trouble once they arrive, though, because he had actually cheated at his last Olympics, and many people were still angry with him because of it.
One night, the captain of the team pulls the coach aside to talk. He wants to know with all that the captain had going for him- what could have possibly possessed him to cheat at the Olympics? I love the coaches answer- he basically describes that winning had become everything for him. He needed to win another gold medal. He explains, “If you’re not enough without it, then you’ll never be enough with it.”
I love the line, because its such a common problem in our lives. We think we are just doing something because we enjoy it, but there is a slim line between working hard at something, and letting it consume you. A thin line between doing something you enjoy, and having that become your entire identity. But it’s in between those lines that we need to learn to live.
A gold medal sounds like an extreme example, but we all come across this every day- from sports, to music, to schoolwork, to high-paced jobs, it is easy to make your life totally revolve around how well you do at a particular task. The problem is, if you aren’t able to succeed at that thing, if someone better comes along, or it you simply make a mistake, your very identity is suddenly totally gone. Putting our identity in our actions pushes us all- to be better for sure, but also to be driven into never ending spirals where we sacrifice life and normalcy for perfection and esteem in order to try to get us where we want to be.
Even more frustrating, is that if your identity is in your job, ability, or work, there is no end point that is good enough. As in this movie, you can work yourself to the bone and get a gold medal, but then you need more to continue to prove your worth. “If you’re not good enough without it, then you’ll never be good enough with it.” Every win is simply a limited token that has no long-lasting power to change your overall worth.
For me, this always showed up in perfectionism. It almost drove me crazy. I worked myself to the bone trying to be perfect at every task I did, but no matter how much I excelled at, I never felt good enough. Even this week, working on a fundraiser for the book I wrote, I heard myself say that if I raised the money, then clearly I was good enough to be a writer… But either I am either a writer or not, regardless of what I have to show for it.
What is it about our society that drives us to be constantly seeking approval and impressive remarks from others, when the only way to find true, lasting worth is in God? Try again. Work harder. Practice makes perfect. And so on and so forth. Our world teaches us to go harder- to never stop trying, stop working, stop achieving. But no matter how hard you work, there is always something left to work on. Sadly, no matter what you work at, it will never give you peace or fulfillment because you will never be able to be perfect so there will always be more to correct and to prove. It took me far too long to understand this in my own life, but I’m going to say it in the hopes that you can learn from my mistakes: Let God and God alone define you. Just stand back and trust.
True freedom and identity comes from knowing that you have worth not because of what you do but because of who God is. Ephesians 1:3 says that those who have believed in Jesus have been chosen adopted as a child of God. You have worth, then, and the worth of a child of royalty, simply because of what Jesus did, not because of what you do. And for every place that you messed up, His “grace is sufficient for you, for His power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9a). So for every second place medal, every B+, every tiny misstep, or total failure, God looks at us and sees perfection because Jesus makes up all the rest of what we didn’t do. And that’s a beautiful place to be.
“Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me… For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Cor 12:9b-10).