To Win, or Not to Win?

It was never worth it to win before.  -Not to me.  Someone always had to loose that way, somebody usually got upset... I always figured that made "competitive" a bad thing. 

Looking back now, I hardly ever won on purpose as a kid.  True, there were places for competition, but only when I was sure it wasn't a bad thing.  The problem with that?  I was almost never sure if it wasn't a bad thing, and when I did win it always came with feeling bad for whoever lost.  Pathetic, I know.

Just recently I got into a discussion with someone about this and after sorting it out and hearing things from his point of view I broke free from something that had held me back all my life. 

We had both just come from a race which had been advertised as a "family fun run/walk/crawl" -he had run it and I had watched from the finish line.  He was in the middle of saying something about how he loved the competitiveness of the whole thing, when I said how much I really didn't like it.

Watching the agony that these people went through to win, the disgust or discouragement, the limit pushing, the angry crying when a little kid "lost" was enough to re-enforce the findings of my childhood and I just didn't like it.

He disagreed with me still though and I don't remember much of what he said, but I'm glad that he did it because that was where I began to see "competitive" from a new perspective. 

"Being competitive is not about winning, it's about seeing how much you can do."

I went away knowing he was right and not really sure how, but this sentence stuck in my head and after a few days I started to try it out.  The amazing thing is that, not only did I start to find I could do all kinds of things I never knew, but it was all free of the guilt I'd felt before when I'd thought that the purpose of competing was to win, or, to beat the other people.  Then everything I had thought about it before slowly began to replace itself with this thought: "it's not about winning, it's about seeing how much you can do".

You know, God made us and there is no doubt that His work is amazing!  And every time we strive to be all that we can be, we are finding out just a little bit more of His handiwork and power and there is nothing to be ashamed of there, where as I guess at the same time that if you're just sitting back because you don't want someone else to loose, well, you could probably say you're kinda hiding some of God's work and not really helping anyone out in the mean time.

True, if your goal for winning is to put someone else down.... yeah, your motives are probably not in the right place, but who ever said this was about comparing ourselves with each other anyway?  The truth? -comparing is not recommended at all: "comparing themselves among themselves, they are not wise."

Let's go be the people God made us to be, yeah? and when someone does better than you, rejoice in what God has done; and when you do better than someone, you can rejoice, because He's done that too!