Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. (James 1:17, NIV)
In the moments after her US Open championship at the Olympic Club, before she had left the green where she’d sunk a birdie putt to win, Yuka Saso gave Jerry Foltz a minute or two of raw honesty. Foltz asked Saso whether, when she showed up at the course that week, she believed a victory like this to be possible.
“Not really,” Saso said—and in that moment most everything we’ve been led to believe about the critical importance of confidence blew away like a wispy cloud of fog on a San Francisco morning.
But Saso went on to say something that has become increasingly common among tour players on both the women’s and men’s sides. When describing how she hung on despite two early double bogeys on Sunday, she concluded: “Trust the process.”
The trouble most of us have with confidence is not that it is mysterious or fleeting or magical—You just gotta believe! The trouble is that we think it is one or more of these things. We hope to catch it. Lightning in a bottle, you know. Yet San Francisco’s great sports hero Joe Montana said it starkly, “Confidence is a very fragile thing.”
Athletes and artists who know their disciplines will tell you more and more that inspiration, while wonderful, is no replacement for something greater.
The trouble in life—whether or not we live on a farm—is that we get to counting our chickens too early.
Jack Nicklaus once noted: “Confidence is the most important single factor in this game, and no matter how great your natural talent, there is only one way to obtain and sustain it: work.”
This is what Yuka Saso understood. She couldn’t count on the golf fairy to show up at just the right time on Sunday’s back nine—or any other time, for that matter. But she could count on her work producing results one day. And maybe, just maybe, those results would be good enough to win now. They were.
What does this mean for you and me? Few of us are professional golfers, let alone competing on the world’s top tours. But many of us find ourselves in places where a shot of confidence would be very helpful. Tell this to a psychologist or self-help author and they might recommend you tape a list of positive “I ams” on your bathroom mirror, so you can recite them to yourself before heading off to wherever you must head today. But all the “I ams” in the world won’t work like a few disciplined “I wills.”
There’s more. When my confidence is built on me, the gravity of my sin nature pins me down. So I look to God, in whom there is no turning, no change. Martin Luther preached this about leaning wholly on God: “Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that a man could stake his life on it a thousand times.”
Jesus taught illustratively that ultimate victory comes not because of the builder’s design or construction but because of the foundation the builder chooses. Build on solid ground. Build on unshakeable hope. Build on Jesus. Do this and a thousand storms won’t crush your confidence. They’ll testify to it.
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Jeff Hopper
June 15, 2021
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The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.