Olympic Gold

Over the past few years, I’ve been mulling over the question of how one should go about living for God. What does it mean to bring glory to God in everything I do? What does that look like? How do we do that? Is that even possible in this day and age? It's a question I'm not sure I will ever have an absolute answer to, but strive to understand to the best of my ability. Nonetheless, as I have been watching the Olympic games, oddly enough, I think I may be starting to see just a slight glimmer of hope towards some sort of faint answer…

With all this hype about the Olympics lately, I've been doing a lot of thinking about the games, competitors, talents, and countries involved. And, well, when you do some thinking about one thing while simultaneously having questions in your mind about another thing (like how to glorify God), both the question and the stuff of your new thinking begins to collide. Hence, it wasn't long before I began to relate the entire experience of any Olympian in these games to the life of a Christian striving to glorify God. The more I thought about it, the more I saw a relationship between the two. As I see it, each Olympian represents their home country; they compete to win a prize and gain honor for that country, to bring glory to that place and to those people that they love. I thought about how Michael Phelps, Shawn Johnson, Kerri Walsh, etc., compete for USA. If the Olympics could be compared to life, we could say that these Olympians live for USA. We can tell from their appearance (outfits) whom they represent and from their attitude and words that America is the country they are excited to show-off to the rest of the world. Furthermore, I see that they compete in the Olympics for more than just the fun of it… they want to win. And not just win any old medal – they want the gold! (Who wouldn’t?) In fact, they have so much passion for the gold, their sport, and their team that they are willing to put in years, if not decades, of training and do not find it uncommon to have actual dreams about achieving that gold medal.

Similarly, perhaps living for God is a sort of representing Him – showing off the One from whom we come, letting everyone know by our sheer appearance that He’s the one we’re living for, training for a lifetime for rigorous competition/action against His opposition, never letting our eyes off the gold – our real reward in Heaven, etc. Much like Olympians whose goal is to represent their country, maybe Christians should strive to represent God in a similar manner -- attempting to bring glory to God through everything they do, training hard and fighting vigorously that they might win the gold in His name, and ultimately gaining honor that He, alone, might be praised above all. This doesn't entirely answer the question(s) that I have (and I’m not quite sure it makes sense either), but I do think it at least gives me an idea of what glorifying God could look like for a Christian in this present age. I just find it interesting what the Olympic games can teach if only we are willing to think…