Before the Lights Come On

You’re almost there.

The first game is close now. The lights that have been off this whole preseason are about to come on. And everything you’ve done in here — every rep, every sprint, every early morning, every time you showed up when you didn’t feel like it — is about to become visible in a way it hasn’t been yet.

Before that happens, I want to take one minute to mark what happened in here when no one was watching.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

Proverbs 13:4 is one of those verses that sounds simple until you sit with it.

The contrast isn’t between a lazy person and a hard-working person. It’s between someone whose appetite is never filled and someone whose desires are fully satisfied. The difference is diligence. And diligence isn’t intensity. It’s consistency. It’s showing up and doing the work day after day, especially when the appetite — the want, the drive, the excitement — has gone quiet.

That’s what preseason is. It’s the season of diligence before the season of competition. And the verse says: the person who stays diligent gets to the other side of it fully satisfied. Not just done. Satisfied. There’s a difference.

You are about to find out what that satisfaction feels like.

The work you did before the lights came on is the exact thing that determines what happens when the lights are on. There is a direct line between what happened in this building over the last several weeks and what is about to happen in the building full of people. You drew that line. With your choices. Day after day, when nobody was making highlight clips of it.

The lights are almost on. Everything you built in the dark is about to show up in the light.

Go play.

This is a celebration question. Let it be that. Don’t redirect it to something more serious. The team deserves to mark what they did before you send them into the season.