“What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Mark 8:36, NIV)
It is common, when we move out of one year and into another, to read tribute articles to those we have lost in the year that was. In golf, one our losses in 2018 was World Golf Hall of Famer Carol Mann.
In 2007, we featured Ms. Mann in the Links Players magazine, then called the Links Letter. In that first-person story, which you can read here, Ms. Mann looked back on her life and said, “It didn’t take me long to realize that chasing things of the world, or chasing improving myself, were not what I needed. What I needed was the Lord. He is enough. And he loves me just the way I am.”
Carol Mann’s LPGA Tour career of 38 wins included the 1965 US Women’s Open, as well as another major the preceding year at the Women’s Western Open. Carol Mann could play golf. She would later go on to serve for more than 20 years as a corporate hospitality representative for the PGA Tour. Carol Mann enjoyed golfers.
Loving golf, loving golfers. That alone might make for a pretty good life—if life ended on the top side of the grass.
But as we know, when we breathe our last breaths, no matter how fresh the air, the dirt and grass cover nearly all we are and all we have accomplished. We still can’t, as the saying goes, take it with us.
Carol knew that Jim possessed the connection to God that she did not. She asked him, “What does God want me to do?”Our lives, though, come with something than can neither be buried nor memorialized. This is our soul. It is the part of us that connects us to God, if indeed our hearts are open to that connection.
Jesus taught that there is an order to our lives, and this order begins with our souls. Get this out of whack and your eulogy may say a lot about how nice and noble you were and yet absolutely nothing about whether you ever made right with the Lord. I’ve been to such funerals. For all their kind words and honor, they leave me depressed.
When Carol Mann reached the point in her life where she recognized all she had were trophies, she turned to a friend: her ex-husband Jim Hardy. Jim and Carol had remained partners in the teaching of golf, and Carol knew that Jim possessed the connection to God that she did not. She asked him, “What does God want me to do?”
The answer Jim gave her led her to the place of understanding that the things of the world would never be enough. The only count if they are put in the right order—below our life in Jesus Christ. From there, Carol Mann found salvation. From there, you can too.
—
Jeff Hopper
January 7, 2019
Copyright 2019 Links Players International
The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.