Losers, Loyalties, and Life

So the Seahawks lost again last weekend. At least, so I hear. I'm not all that enamoured with football, so I neither watched the game nor cared to check on the results afterwards. But many of my coworkers are fans with a capital "F." In such an environment, I can only maintain my peaceful ignorance so long.

This morning while I was flipping radio stations, I caught a snatch of an interview with one of the Seahawks players team members. Don't bother ro ask which one. As you may have gathered by now, I generally zip by sports-discussing radio programs with the same rapidity I might scan past a station in some foreign language. But for some reason, I stuck with this interview for an extra minute--and was surprisingly rewarded with the following question and answer:

"So, how are the people you run into on the street & among your friends handling all these losses?" the commentater inquired of the player.

"Oh, it's tough, you know. Everyone has an idea of what you could change--should change," the player chuckled, "I have to deal with myself, even. I mean, I have ideas of things I think we could change. But I have to tell myself, 'that's not my job. ' I'm not the coach. I'm a footabll player on a football team. My job is to do what the coach says, the way he says it, and inspire my team members to be on board with the coach's game plan. That's it."

I wonder how much simpler my life would be if I never tried to infuse my own ideas into the game plan God lays before me? If I focused more on the goals of the moment and less on my (not so) brilliant strategizing for the future?

As John Quincy Adams so aptly summarized, "Duty is ours. Results are God's."