What does it really mean to be successful?
I was thinking about that recently as I watched the Wimbledon tennis championships on TV.
Following the action at Wimbledon this year made me strangely reflective, perhaps because I was recovering from yet another orthopedic surgery and feeling 150 years old.
I remembered how, as a kid, I loved watching legends like Rod Laver and Billie Jean King play at Wimbledon. Even on a grainy black-and-white TV, it looked like magic.
While watching one of those Wimbledon finals 40-something years ago, I decided I wanted to be a tennis player. I honestly thought that if I worked hard enough, I could one day play at Wimbledon, so I found an old tennis racket and began hitting balls against our metal garage door.
Bang, bang, bang … (pause to chase ball) … bang, bang, bang.
I’m sure it drove our neighbors quite crazy.
I soon discovered that the outside brick walls of my elementary school provided a better hitting backboard, so I began riding my bike over there to pound tennis balls. I lost more than a few on the roof, but I kept at it. Day after day after day.
Sometimes I talked a friend into hitting balls with me on a quiet street near my house. We paid dearly for missing because those suckers rolled a long, long way.
Down in Florida, a young Chris Evert was taking real lessons on a pristine court from her teaching pro dad, and I was chasing balls down Adams Boulevard in Terre Haute, Ind., but I still thought I could make it to Wimbledon.
Eventually, I was old enough to take free lessons offered at some school courts. I was hooked on the sport. I began playing in area tournaments—nothing glamorous, to say the least, but it kept my tennis passion stoked.
I practiced hard and came to be a sort of big tennis fish in a very, very small tennis pond in Indiana, the basketball state. Then came college. I made the team at Auburn, but quickly realized I’d never play pro tennis.
Pro tennis players basically toddle from the crib to the court. No matter how hard I worked, it was too little, too late, and I was never going to make it to Wimbledon.
That’s what I was pondering the other day as I watched the world’s best playing on those hallowed courts.
To be honest, I was feeling like a bit of a failure, until God interrupted my thoughts. Pity parties are just no fun at all when the Holy Spirit shows up like that.
God reminded me that His definition of success is so very different from the world’s. Success in His eyes is about faithfulness. It’s about living in relationship with Him and simply doing what He shows us to do every day, for all the days He gives us.
Maybe not doing it perfectly, but doing it faithfully.
There’s a good chance no one will applaud when we do that, but I think God smiles.
So, which is better? The applause of men or the smile of God?
I had dozens of tennis trophies that tarnished and literally fell apart in our storage building over the years. How typical of the rewards this world can offer.
But the smile of God lasts forever.
I didn’t make it to Wimbledon, but I made it into the arms of God, and through the grace of Jesus Christ, I’ll make it into His heaven.
You know what I realized? That’s more than enough for me.
“For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matthew 16:26)