The Power of Presence

Nobody told you that most of what you do would be invisible.

You show up. You sit in the back of meetings you were not invited to lead. You stand on the edge of practice and watch. You eat with people who are thinking about other things. You send texts that do not always get answered. You pray in hallways and parking lots and equipment rooms and none of it makes a highlight reel.

And on the hard days, the days when the coach walks right past you without a word and the players do not make eye contact and you drive home wondering what exactly you are accomplishing, the enemy will offer you a very tidy answer: nothing. You are accomplishing nothing.

Before you believe that, sit with Jesus in a garden for a moment.

Read both passages slowly — both deserve a breath after them.

And then this one:

Let those sit for a second before you move.

It is the night before the cross. Jesus has shared a last meal with the men he loves most. He has washed their feet. He has told them everything they need to know and they have understood almost none of it. Now he takes them to Gethsemane, to the garden on the slope of the Mount of Olives, and he does something that should stop us cold.

He asks for their presence.

Not their strategy. Not their theology. Not even their prayers, exactly, though he asks for that too. He says, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” The Son of God, in the hour of his greatest anguish, needs his people near him. He needs them to be there.

They fall asleep. Three times he returns and three times he finds them unable to stay awake. And here is the thing worth sitting with: he does not dismiss them. He does not send them home. He keeps coming back to them. Even when they cannot give him what he needs, he wants them close.

If the Son of God needed the power of presence, you and I certainly do too.

So does the coach sitting in his office at 11 o’clock at night after a loss he cannot explain. So does the player who had the worst game of his life and is now staring at the ceiling in his dorm room. So does the assistant coach who just found out his contract is not being renewed. They do not need your curriculum in that moment. They need you to be there.

This is harder than it sounds, because presence costs something. It costs time you could spend on something measurable. It costs the comfort of knowing what to say. It costs the protection of staying at a safe professional distance.

I learned this the hard way.

A coach in my program lost a family member after a long illness. I assumed his phone was overwhelmed with messages. I did not want to add to the noise. I did not text. When he returned, I went to his office and told him I had assumed his phone was blowing up. He looked at me and said: “I know. You hurt me.”

That is the cost of miscalculating presence. The text I did not send was the very thing he needed. Not the words in it, not the theology of it. The fact of it. The evidence that I was there, thinking of him, that someone who cared was paying attention.

Presence is not passive. It is not simply occupying space near someone. It is the active choice to show up when you do not know what to say, to reach out when you are not sure it will be received, to stay in the room when there is nothing to do but be there. That choice costs something every time. And every time, it is the right choice.

The Apostle Paul puts the theological foundation under all of this in Galatians 2:20: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” And then Colossians 1:27 names the secret: “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

What you carry into that locker room is not your experience or your stories or your programs. You carry Christ. His presence in you becomes presence for them. When you show up, you are not just yourself walking through the door. You are bringing the King of Kings into the room. That is not sentiment. That is the actual theology of what character coaching is.

Which is why, when our program was building its bubble roster for the NCAA tournament and could only bring 36 people, the coaching staff was unanimous: they were taking me. Not because I coach. Not because I prepare film. Because they wanted the power of presence. They wanted what I carry into a room.

There is a photograph from that time. Me on my knees in a circle with the team, moments after a championship. It exists because I was in the room.

On the days when you feel like a wallflower, when you wonder what you are doing and whether any of it matters, remember this: you are a carrier. You are not the presence. You carry the presence. And the presence you carry is the presence of Jesus Christ himself.

That is what they need. Not your stories. Not your programs. Not your best chapel talk.

You. There. With him in you.

That is the power of presence.

This question is designed to be personal and specific, not theoretical. Give people time to sit with an actual moment rather than a general principle. The goal is not guilt but recalibration toward showing up even when the outcome is uncertain.