But what about the times when we face difficult situations that, humanly speaking, there will be no dramatic turnaround?
In my final year of high school, our soccer team met a formidable opponent in the state tournament. This team was nationally renowned, and during club play each spring, they would come out on top in tournaments around the nation. During the fall school season, they had given up all of three goals the entire season, and they beat most opponents by ten goals or more.
I remember the week we prepared to play this team in the state tournament. When we found out who our next opponent would be, we gathered in our locker room before practice. Our coach entered and started our week's preparation with a simple sentence: "We are ****ed." (And he didn't say "fudge.")
Some might chastise our coach for his defeatist attitude. Why couldn't we pull of a Herculean effort à la the 1980 Olympic hockey team? Shouldn't he have rallied us around a compelling vision of how we would defeat this Goliath?
Perhaps.
But I preferred the tack our coach chose. He was an incredible coach, and had led us to be regional champions, despite the fact that we had lost several good players to graduation and injury. If there was a way for us to win, he would have taken us down that path.
Sometimes, we find ourselves in situations where we know we're going down, so we might as well go down fighting. This game would be one of them. We practiced that week, determined to give everything we had. And we did. Though we eventually lost 11-1, we never gave up, and became just the fourth squad to score a goal against them that year. I still remember that I--as a goalkeeper--saw 52 shots on goal that game, which is a lot for a hockey game, let alone a soccer match. Each person honored our coach and our teammates by absolutely going nuts and never letting down. It actually ended up being one of the most fun games I ever played in.
In ministry, and in life, we sometimes find ourselves in situations where, humanly speaking, there is no win possible. Sometimes, the best thing we can do is to simply be faithful to our God--to go down fighting, so to speak. I was in a situation like this almost three years ago. I served a shrinking church, and for a variety of reasons, it became clear that our little church would cease to exist in about six months. It was a very difficult time for me. I was worried about finding new employment to take care of my family, our senior pastor began to check out emotionally and physically, and the death knell had zapped just about every ounce of creative passion from me--it's hard to be passionate about working for a dying organization. It took everything I had to be faithful to God and to the families who committed to sticking it out with us until the end of the school year.
Many of you are in situations where there will be no dramatic turnaround. You hope things will change, but it's pretty clear that they won't. And though so much of you wants to just throw in the towel, to stop spending your time, energy, and even resources on a lost cause, let me encourage you with this: we are not called always to be winners; we are called to be faithful to a Savior who died on our behalf, then beat death. May we rest in that victory when there is no victory in sight.
