A quarterback announced this week that he is done playing football. Fourteen seasons, a Super Bowl ring, a career most kids only get to imagine while throwing a ball at a hoop on the garage. And when Russell Wilson went public with the news, he did not do it from a podium or a press box. He stood in Rio de Janeiro, beneath the outstretched arms of the Christ the Redeemer statue, and said plainly that Christ is more than enough.
I keep coming back to where he chose to stand. Not the stadium. Not the trophy case. He put himself under a pair of open arms and let that be the picture.
Everybody has a last day at the thing they do
Most of us will never take a snap in an NFL game, but every single one of us has a version of that last day coming. The last shift. The last classroom. The last season coaching the team. The last time your kids need you the way they needed you when they were small. The farm changes hands. The company sells. The knee gives out. The role that people used your name for — Coach, Sarge, Mom, boss, the one who always fixed it — quietly stops being the thing you are.
And here is the honest part. Sometimes it ends on your terms and you get to pick the moment and the mountaintop. Sometimes it just ends, sooner than you wanted, and nobody asks your opinion. Either way you wake up the next morning and have to find out what is actually holding you up.
Paul sat down and did the math
The apostle Paul had a résumé he was proud of. Pedigree, education, zeal, a reputation among the people whose opinion he valued most. Then he ran into Jesus, and later he wrote this down:
"But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things." (Philippians 3:7-8)
Notice he does not say his accomplishments were worthless. He says he moved them to a different column. He had them on the asset side of the ledger, and after meeting Christ he recalculated. Not because achievement is evil — Paul worked harder than most of us ever will — but because he found something with more weight to it. He found a worth that did not depend on his next performance.
That is a different thing from pretending the loss does not sting. Paul says he lost all things. He felt it. He just knew what he had gained was heavier.
What the Spirit says when the cheering stops
This is where I think we sell people short. We tell them, correctly, that their identity is in Christ, and then we leave them to try to believe it by willpower on a Tuesday afternoon in an empty house. That is not how it works. Scripture says "The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children" (Romans 8:16). Testifies. Present tense. The Holy Spirit is not waiting for you to talk yourself into it — He speaks it to you, deep down where the noise cannot reach.
I have watched this happen in real time, in leadership rooms and living rooms both. Someone whose title just got taken away sits down to pray expecting nothing, and something settles on them. They cannot explain it and they do not need to. God tells them who they are, and it holds. If you are in that spot, ask Him. Ask out loud. Have somebody lay a hand on your shoulder and ask with you. He is not stingy with that kind of assurance.
Friday nights in Ravenna
The high school season is just getting going around here, and the lights will be on Friday night across West Michigan. There is nothing wrong with any of it — the noise, the band, the kid who catches one and will remember it for forty years. God gives good gifts and He is not embarrassed by our joy in them.
Just know this while you are cheering: the whistle blows on every game. The scoreboard goes dark. And the arms that were stretched out over that man in Rio were stretched out first on a cross, and they were stretched out for you — not for your best year, not for your highlight reel, for you. That is the one thing about you that no announcement can end.
If the thing you were known for is over, or ending, or slipping, you are not diminished. You are being handed back to the One who never valued you by your output in the first place. Christ really is more than enough. Ask the Spirit to make that more than a sentence, and He will.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.