Humiliation Has Its Own Lesson

That was hard to be a part of.

Not just the loss. The scoreline. The way it felt in the fourth quarter when the gap kept growing and there was nothing you could do about it. That’s a different kind of difficult than a close loss. It has a different emotional texture. And it deserves a different response than the usual post-game talk.

So let’s just be honest about what just happened.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

Psalm 44 is one of the most honest prayers in Scripture. The psalmist doesn’t pretend things are fine. He names the shame directly. He tells God exactly what it feels like. And then — remarkably — he keeps praying. He doesn’t walk away from God because things went badly. He walks toward him with the raw truth of what happened.

There’s a model there for tonight.

The wrong response to a blowout is to pretend it didn’t hurt. It hurt. The score was what it was and you can’t undo it. And trying to immediately spin it into a learning moment or a motivational story dismisses the real experience you just had.

The right response is to feel it honestly — the way the psalmist does — and then refuse to let it be the final word. Shame covered our face, he says. And then: awake. Rouse yourself. Don’t let this be forever.

Tonight is hard. Tomorrow is still coming. You’re still a team. The scoreline doesn’t erase what you’ve built or who you are. It’s a bad night, not a permanent verdict.

Minimal pressure. Some rooms will be very quiet after a blowout. That’s okay. The scripture and the teach do the work even if no one speaks.