Adversity & Setbacks
Something is happening in one of our players’ lives that has nothing to do with this team and everything to do with how they are showing up.
The loss, or the family situation, or the relationship, or the thing that is happening at home that they brought into the building today because there was nowhere else to put it. The team is not the cause of the grief. But the team is where the person carrying it is spending most of their time right now.
Read this passage slowly.
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.
2 Corinthians 1:3–4 — NIVLet that sit for a second before you move.
We comfort others with the comfort we ourselves receive. Paul is describing a transmission of care — the person who has been held in their own hard thing becoming capable of holding others in theirs. The team that has learned to hold difficulty together in the athletic context has the capacity to hold the non-athletic grief of its members too, because the relational muscle is the same one.
The athletic environment has a complicated relationship with the personal lives of its members. On one hand, the culture often demands that players leave what is happening outside the building outside the building. On the other hand, people do not work that way. The player who is in the middle of a significant personal loss brings that loss into every practice and every competition, whether it is acknowledged or not. The choice is not whether it enters the room. The choice is whether the room makes space for it or pretends it isn’t there.
Making space does not require the team to become a counseling environment or for everyone to process each other’s personal situations in full. It requires acknowledging that the people in this room are whole people whose lives extend beyond the sport. A simple: we know you are carrying something right now, we see you, we are for you — that acknowledgment does more than the pretense that the sport is the only thing that matters.
Be the team that knows how to hold what is happening outside the building.
The choice is not whether what is happening outside the building enters the room. The choice is whether the room makes space for it or pretends it isn’t there.
Is there someone in this room right now who is carrying something outside the sport that you have noticed but haven’t acknowledged? What would it look like to acknowledge it?
Gentle and specific. The question creates permission without requiring disclosure.
Be the team that sees the whole person. That acknowledgment matters more than you know.
This devotional should be delivered with awareness of the specific situation in the room. If a player’s grief is very acute or recent, coordinate with them before making it a group topic.