Win/Loss Ratio a bit low?

Nobody who ever gave his best regretted it. (George Halas)

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (Romans 12:1-2)

Do we live with regrets? Yes, sadly, many of us do live with regrets - things we wished we would have said, done, or pursued. There is no place for regrets in this walk with Jesus, though. Jesus doesn't 'set us up' for regrets - he sets us up for victory. We may fail to keep our promises to him on occasion, but that doesn't mean we have to form an 'attachment' to the failure by stashing it away as a regret. It means we have the opportunity to take it to him, lay it down at his feet, and allow him to 'remold' the regret into the next steps we should take. It is commonplace to actually 'fail' and dwell upon the failure. God asks us to not live 'commonplace' lives, but to live 'extra-ordinary' lives - IN HIM. There is absolutely no room for regrets when we walk with Jesus - only redeeming moments. 

Do we sometimes think we have given our best and still don't do as well as we had hoped? Yes, of course that happens, but it must not be our stopping place. We might 'give it our all' and still not quite make it as far as we imagined. If we stop there, we give into the idea that we are incapable of ever achieving the goal. That may very well be true! Sometimes we need our goal adjusted a bit - because WE chose the goal, not God. At other times, we gave our all, but God is showing us he wants to be there to make up for what our 'all' is not capable of producing. We might need to lean in a bit closer and hold on a bit tighter to achieve the goal. Either way, God has the power to redeem the moment - it is not all a failure!

Do we want the best, but have no idea how to achieve it? It is possible we have some idea of what the 'best' will look like, but there are times when we have no clue. We just see that big hurdle in the middle of our path and know there is absolutely no way we are going to make it around it, over it, or even under it! We imagine the worst even before we take the first step toward it. George Halas was a baseball player, football player, and eventually a football coach, and team owner, nicknamed "Papa Bear" by his friends in the sport. Do you know what his regular season win stats were? In 47 years, his wins amounted to 67.1% of the games his teams played. Did he give up after the first loss? No, he pursued the win - for 47 years. The win may evade us on occasion, but it never suggests we just stop pursuing it, my friends. Just sayin!