For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ, we share abundantly in comfort too. (2 Corinthians 1: 3-, ESV)
No one sets out to play poorly. I’ve never met anyone who stood on the first tee and hoped for a miserable round. When we stare down that first fairway, “Hope Springs Eternal.”
On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of golfers who, after finishing a round, slam their clubs in the trunk and mutter something like, “This is a stupid game.” This short-sighted view fails to realize we can learn from our failures and deep disappointments.
After a miserable round, I once observed a good friend, many years ago now, place his golf bag in the middle of the club parking lot and run over those misbehaving instruments of double bogeys at what looked like forty miles per hour. He never looked back! True story!
I vividly remember watching Colin Montgomery drive away from Congressional C.C. after finishing second to “The Big Easy” in the 1997 U.S. Open. The look on his face was pure grief. Missing by a shot, Montgomery drove away inconsolably.
Eight years later, Colin would stand in the middle of the fairway with a seven iron into the seventy-second hole of the 2006 U.S. Open. Inexplicably, he hit it “fat.” To add insult to injury, he made a double bogey, costing him a chance at a playoff with Geoff Ogilvy.
There is no escaping it! If we leave the range and go into the great unknown of a round of golf, all sorts of disappointments are possible—a butter fade on the outward half turns into a pull hook on the inward half. Making the turn four under convinces you, “Today I am going low,” only to wind up four over on the back.
You might push back at this point and argue: “Yeah, but when we embrace the challenge of 18 holes, we might play great and experience unparalleled joy, too.” No argument from me on that point. However, this is a devotional about embracing grief.
So, what do we do when the “wheels come off” in a round? Pout? Murmur? Quit? Curse? Run over our clubs with the car? Or, as another old friend once did, throw your clubs in a lake and never return to retrieve those insubordinate instruments of torture.
Suffering, disappointment, and sorrow come to us all, on and off the course. The joys of golf are indeed wonderful. Holing out on a par four from the middle of the fairway is delightful. Blading it from the bunker out of bounds is inexpressibly depressing.
Life mimics golf in many ways, not least by providing great emotional highs and profoundly deep and distressing lows. What to do?
In golf, we can choose to learn from a bad swing or an awful round. In life, we can embrace our sorrows, learn what Christ desires to teach us, grieve in our pain, and grow more into the likeness of “…a man of sorrows and [one] acquainted with grief….” (Isaiah 53:3).
God never wastes our suffering. Of course, that requires we follow him in the obedience of faith. Too many followers of Christ Jesus never realize God’s intentions through suffering, either because they become embittered by their circumstances or by refusing to embrace their suffering with deeply felt grief. Consequently, they become spiritually stuck.
As C. S. Lewis once insightfully observed, “We can ignore pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
Prayer: Jesus! Confirm in our hearts that suffering is never wasted for the one who trusts you through it all.