what I wanted ...

Again I return to the topic of wrestling as a reflection on my life. I loved wrestling - I still do, whenever I can get to a practice with a local team. There is something about it that is just great. Maybe it's because it's a sport that is ideal for my body type. Maybe it's because I achieved some limited early success. Maybe because it was a place that I felt some measure of belonging, and then found out that I was good at it.

But what I wanted more than anything, I think, was a coach who saw my potential, who believed in me, and who invested in me. I would have run through a brick wall for someone like that. Now, I'm really not knocking my high school or college coaches - they may have done everything someone could ask a coach to do. But, inside my head, I longed for someone to stick with me, to encourage me, to work with me, to invest in me, to get to know me and what motivated me and spur me on to whatever I could have been ... but perhaps I was the one in the wrong. I'm not sure anyone could have done what I was asking within my heart at that time. Oh, sure, perhaps I did have the talent to be a state placewinner or a collegiate conference champion, or perhaps not. We won't know any more than what I actually accomplished this side of eternity. I think though, that perhaps the issue was really that God-shaped hole in my soul that Pascal spoke of so many years ago. Perhaps what I really wanted was God. Something bigger than myself to define my life. Someone who cared about me, who believed in me, who would stick with me through everything to help me become what I was made to be...

So perhaps this longing in me was really the longing for God that God himself had awakened in me. And perhaps I was being idolatrous, thinking that a coach or success in a sport could fill the void that only God can. Perhaps even this sense of unfulfiled dreams I have today with respect to wrestling is a remnant in me of this idolatry. God has used this experience, though to remind me that only He truly satisfies. Yet, I chase after these other things, after other people who I think will help me "become all I can be." But only God knows what I was meant to be - and that is not primarily something grand I am called to do, but ultimately "just" to be His child. To resemble Him, to further His Kingdom, and to accomplish his goals. So that my life is bigger than just my life.

What I wanted, I thought, was someone who believed in me and knew how to get me to some ultimate goal. God didn't let me settle for that, though. He knows me and the plans he has for me, and because I'm His, he will never leave me nor forsake me, but take me to the place He designed me to be - at His feet, in His family. What I wanted amounted to a pile of rusted trinkets ...