When Julien Alfred won a gold medal in the 100m at this summer’s Olympic games it was an Olympic first. Many other athletes won gold medals, but she had not. Three other countries achieved their first gold this year, namely, Botswana, Dominica and Guatemala, and three other countries won their first medal of any colour, which were Albania, Cape Verde and Dominica.
Another woman soon achieved a similar first as Thea LaFond won gold in the Triple Jump for Guatemala. Two women, two firsts in athletic achievement in the first year in which the same number of women as men competed in the games. I cannot even start to imagine how it feels to achieve something so amazing or, indeed, what it must feel like to do it for a nation that has never ever previously won a medal.
This is not comment on the biblical analogies of the life of faith being like training for games or being single minded in pursuit of a prize. I want to reflect on apparent failure. Except for the Sundays, the daily bible readings in the first twelve days of October come from the book of Job. If you google Job, you learn that it is the oldest and first of the poetic books in the Old Testament and is about a man who was blameless and upright, feared God and shunned evil.
It is tempting to avoid reading Job because of the myriad things that go wrong for him and the apparent ruthlessness of God’s treatment of him as the ancient feud between God and the Devil, or good and evil plays out. The punch line of Job is of things coming good for him eventually despite terrible setbacks. As an aside, the book makes sense if it is read as a whole and not in snippets, as happens in lessons in Church.
Job is about real life. I never forget being told to keep trying when I through I could not do something; ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.’ The origin of the quote is not clear, but it applies in so many ways. How many failures does an athlete suffer before the moment of gold? I wonder if Guatemala or St Lucia thought they would ever win a medal, let alone the big one?
A Prayer
God, we thank you for the moments of personal success in life, but we pray that when things go well, we will not forget the harder times, the rejections and setbacks, the coming last or even failing to finish. We love you for the way you help us learn from everything and press on to achieve our potential. We ask especially that your spirit will work in us to achieve our spiritual optimum and pray for all who feel rejected or for whom life is comprised of a sense of purposeless gloom or depression. Give us all the grace to keep restarting, for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.