Why I believe in sports
“Do you believe in Miracles”
We’ve heard this same call a thousand times in sports. That last second play where a losing opponent somehow manages to pull out a dramatic and seemingly impossible victory. That incredible individual play where an athlete transcends the idea of limits and does something no on has ever seen before. It’s the way a once unbreakable record falls by the wayside through the heroics on an individual or team.
I’m a believer in sports because I’ve seen more miracles take place inside the lines than anywhere else. I’m sure memories flood into your mind as well, those incredible moments that only sport provides. The tension of uncertainty, the drama of well matched opponents, a dire situation requiring faith, seeing that belief come to life through a miracle, and the transcendence felt by all who witness it.
Why such power?
This article isn’t a deep dive but its resting on deep foundations.
The reason miracles happen in sports is simple; sports emanate out from the heart.
When athletes play them honestly, with passion and purpose, they bring faith and spirit into the arena with them. It’s that quality that won’t let you quit when times get tough. That spirit demands you maintain a high standard, no matter the objective outcome. Play hard to to the whistle, run through the line, don’t give up on yourself.
In ancient philosophy and scripture, the heart is identified as the seat of wisdom.
“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all” - Aristotle
I’ve been doing a lot of meditating and praying over the importance of the heart in guiding our individualized righteous aims. The secular nature of the modern world teaches us to close our hearts to mystery, myth, legend, and uncertainty. We’re told to embrace scientific truth, objective reality, and measurement as the most important ways to ‘know.’ These visciously collide in the sports world.
Grown men who never pray about anything will utter solemn words of hope that their sports teams will pull off the unbelievable and make that epic comeback. They ignore the statistically probability and just for one brief moment, stake their lives on FAITH alone. Let’s be frank here, most believers themselves don’t act with total faith. Often times faith is hedged by practicality in our actions, but almost never in sports. It’s the one place where unbridled belief finds acceptance and celebration in our society.
That’s why it’s ok to have legends, miracles, angels, mythologies, and faith in the sports world. It’s the place where we can give over to our hearts and just live passionately.
Start Living Through Your Heart
I want you to take seriously the importance of living through your heart. We get to choose our frame in this life. It can be dull, drab, devoid of meaning, absent romance, ignorant of mystery, but correlated to measurement, objective truth, and scientific understanding. You might ‘know’ but you can’t ‘feel.’
That’s why so many of us are drawn to the magic of sport, we get to live in a world of romance, uncertainty, metaphorical life and death, rebirth, transcendence, redemption, miracle, and give ourselves over to the irrationality of the heart. And in turn that gives us deep wisdom that we can’t access through the world of the rational.
Sports wouldn’t be magical without miracles.
Life is the same friends.
Meaning, purpose, passion, desire, all come from the heart. These determine the quality of your life. If you lack motivation to go after your dreams. If you shrink from facing and going through adversity to help you grow. If you refuse to live by your values and make compromises every time towards other people’s expectations. I guarantee it’s your head that’s in the way.
Heart FIRST; Let that calibrate your aim and direction.
Head SECOND; Let that figure out how to make it real through action and determination.
This is the correct order.
Sports taught me this.
And ever since I’ve lived this way, I’ve never lacked meaning, courage, fortitude, or wisdom to know what’s truly right and what simply doesn’t matter.
That’s why I believe in them and want you to believe in them too.
If you struggle to find that internal signal of the heart or difficulty in using your mind to figure out how to make it real, my mindset coaching through sport will help guide you correctly. Use the button below and send me a message to start exploring the depth of your heart together.