Going for the gold

“Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.”  -- 1 Thessalonians 5:11

Oh, baby, it’s Olympics season.

Every four years in my youth, every two years more recently -- or, lately, whenever global pandemics allow it -- the world gathers around various electronic devices and watches incredibly talented humans give their all in the name of sport.

Glorious.

Not that I have a strong affinity for sport, in general. My one personal brush-up with athletics consisted of a season of fifth-grade basketball, during which I fervently prayed that the ball would come nowhere near me and my coach called me “Grace,” full irony intended.

But the Olympics. Oh, baby. They’re so great.

I’m all-in for whatever sport the jazzy commentators want to put in front of me. Curling? Sure. Speed skating? Absolutely. Skeleton? Hey, man, whatever. I’m down for it.

Tiny little teenagers and gray-haired veterans from all corners of the earth, stretching to their utmost, thrill me with their strength, their fearlessness, their years of dedicated work and failure and slogging to reach the world’s biggest sports stage and -- for a shining few -- to stand on a podium, hand over heart, belting the words to their national anthem.

One night, early in this year’s games, I soared alongside women competing in the snowboard slopestyle event. What “slopestyle” means I do not know, but those ladies have learned how to fly.

The event’s final contender, New Zealand's Zoi Sadowski-Synnott, was the last barrier that might stand between the then-leading scorer, American Julia Marino, and the top of the podium.

As Sadowski-Synnott zoomed down a fake-snow-covered hill, launching off of ramps to perform breathtaking feats in the air, the announcers roared with approval, their surfer-cool expressions barely adequate to convey the awesomeness of the New Zealander’s “massive” run.

When Sadowski-Synnott whooshed to a halt at the bottom of the hill, Marino, the woman she had just dethroned, raced forward, hurling herself at the new queen of slopestyle and tackling her to the ground in a frenzy of joy and celebration.

It didn’t matter that the women were from different countries. 

It didn’t matter that one had bested the other.

There was just jubilation, and congratulation, and a joining together in the us-ness of something going really well.

Man, I love the Olympics.

They remind me there’s more to life than the top of the podium.

All of us have an instinct, I suspect, to react badly when someone else’s accomplishment threatens our sense of self-worth.

A coworker receives a word of praise from the boss, someone takes a better picture or gives a better speech than ours, and we bristle, snapping to defend our little territory and looking for a way to drag them down to build ourselves up.

Had a fellow slopestyle rider (in the imaginary world in which I have mad athletic skills) just flown past me, smashing my accomplishment into pieces, I think I’d have had to blink back tears as I clapped politely without meaning it.

How much more fun would it be, though, to be the person racing in for a tackle-hug, not caring about my own place on the podium but spilling over with happiness for another human being in their moment of accomplishment?

One of the many weird things about God is his persistent insistence on putting humans at the top of the podium.

I mean, come on. He’s God. The Boss. The big cheese. The 100% gold-medal guy. If you’re God, you're number one, by definition.

But, throughout Biblical history, God-Who-Is-Great continued to lift up the humans He made, despite their erring and foolish ways.

Try as we might to earn the medal we too often feel is our right, we continue to slip, and stumble, and tumble head-over-heels, our imperfections ever standing between us and glory.

But this weird God, washing feet and dining with the underdogs and hanging limp on a cross, picks us up and gives us the award we don’t deserve, running to grab us up in an embrace just because He loves us.

I want to be like that.

I want to reach out and pull others up, cheering their successes, even at the cost of my little pride.

It ain’t easy, fending off that instinct to protect ourselves by tearing others down. But we don’t need to battle for the top.

The Boss already made us number one. 

It’s Olympics season. Hand over heart, anthem of being loved on our lips, whaddaya say we try some celebratory tackle-hugs now and then?

That’s a video clip I’d watch on repeat.

First published in The Alpena News on Feb. 19, 2022.