Life Beyond the Sport
The sport is consuming a lot right now.
Your time, your attention, your emotional energy. The schedule doesn’t leave much margin. And the things that aren’t on the schedule — the relationships, the conversations, the presence with the people who matter most — can disappear into the margins without anyone explicitly deciding that they should.
That’s worth paying attention to.
Read this passage slowly.
Jesus replied: "’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ’Love your neighbor as yourself.’"
Matthew 22:37–39 — NIVLet that sit for a second before you move.
The first and greatest. The second like it. Jesus is establishing an ordering — a priority structure for what matters most. And neither of the top two items on his list is performance or achievement. Both involve love. Both involve relationship. Both involve investment in something other than personal success.
Sport has a way of gradually crowding out what comes first on that list. Not through malice — through the accumulation of demands that each seem reasonable individually but together crowd out the space where the most important things live.
The athlete who gets to the end of their career and looks back at a strong record but attenuated relationships — who sacrificed the first and second priorities for the third or fourth — has made a trade they usually regret. Not because the sport wasn’t worth pursuing. Because the sport was never supposed to replace what comes first.
The sport doesn’t require you to be absent from what matters most. It requires your full professional effort during the hours it claims. What happens in the margins of those hours is still yours. Use them for what the first and second commandments say they’re for.
The sport claims hours. What happens in the margins of those hours is still yours. Don’t let the schedule make the decision about what matters most.
What relationship in your life has been most affected by the demands of the sport? What would investing in it look like this week, even in a small way?
Specific and actionable. The small investment this week is more useful than the general intention to do better.
The sport claims hours. Use the margins for what comes first. Those are still yours.
Most effective during a period when the schedule is particularly consuming and margin for everything else is smallest.