Did any USA athletes glorify God after they came in 4th or lower? It’s easy to glorify God when you win.
RE: Did any USA athletes glorify God after they came in 4th or lower? It’s easy to glorify God when you win.
I remember reading one of Gabby Douglas’ tweets when she said (paraphrasing) “Win or lose I praise Jesus, He has been good to me. God is good all the time”.
She did not garner any medals later in the uneven bars and the beams.
How would anyone know? They don't get interviewed.
There was a comedian several years ago who did a bit about athletes blaming Jesus - "We would have won, if Jesus hadn't made me drop that pass!"
Yes. My cousin was there throwing the discus and she missed
making the final field by 2 positions. One of the first
things she did was email everyone in the family telling us
all how thrilled she was to have gotten that far and giving
thanks. A real classy lady.
To be sure, Christians don’t blame God after they came in 4th and lower.
If you are ignorant what Christians athletes pray for, it is not to “win”. They pray to God to keep them healthy, to keep them focused during practice and competition, to keep them being lazy and not practicing hard, to let their practices be fruitful, and so on.
They pray to God for him to help them fulfill their potential, not to “defeat” their competitors, per se. They don’t pray “please injure my competitor” or “please have them screw up”.
Christian athletes pray to God to help them be their personal best, and if that personal best is only 4th place, then so be it.
So when a Christian athlete places 1st overall, they give thanks to God for helping them to train hard and have the courage to perform, so that by their winning they give Glory to God, saying “, by God’s grace He kept me focused and training long and hard, so that in competition my body could do what was necessary to perform better than all my competitors.”
Christian athletes don’t pray to win directly. They pray to be the best that they can and when they achieve the zenith of their sport, they show that their remarkable physical performance is yet another of God’s acts to show his Glory.
Here is an example. An Olympic swimmer is not going to pray “please let me win.” They are going to pray “please Lord let me ignore the savage burning pain in my lungs as I finish out the race. Please Lord, let me execute my kick turn fluidly as I have trained thousands of times, and not allow doubts to cloud my mind at a critical time. Please Lord, grant me the mental fortitude to fight through the anguish of muscle fatigue with the very last of my strokes as I approach the wall and my muscle cells are bursting with pain oxygen depletion.”
That is the kind of thing that is stated or implied in a Christian athletes typical prayer to God. Not a banal “please let my competitor choke and lose so I can have an easy certain win at their expense.”
It just doesn’t work that way.