More Than The Scoreনমুনা

When we focus on character-wins, our children win. When our focus shifts to winning a sporting contest, our children tend to struggle. We want our children to be responsible, loving, compassionate, and diligent. These character traits are the real wins. After all the games are over, we want to see that the sport has developed a character in our children that prepares them for real life. We want to know that the wins and losses have combined to help our kids be ready for the future.

Our family competes hard in every contest that we are a part of. We want to win every game we play. But, the conversations after the games are focused on how we loved our teammates and how we behaved, especially when something didn’t go our way. We talk about responsibility, honoring coaches, working hard every play, playing with passion, and respecting the officials.

We allowed sports to be an important part of our family. At the same time, we fought the urge to allow sports to define our lives. Biblically, one of the key responsibilities we have as parents is to teach our children the pitfall of gaining the whole world while losing our souls. We want our children to learn, grow, and use the skills they discover through sports to build their character.

The crop we are after is character-based. It’s a crop that we sometimes won’t see come to maturity until our children are faced with a challenge. We then get to watch the character crop come up out of the ground, as our kids rise to the occasion and overcome adversity, doubts, and the odds being stacked against them.

We’re just hitting that season in our life where our grown sons are starting to make adult choices and take on more significant life challenges. And, now that we’re on the “other side” of youth sports, we look back on the many reasons we involved ourselves so heavily in those activities. We see the fruit of those labors.

The most valuable gain has been watching how God has used sports – and the challenges that came with sports – to draw our sons near Him. He also used those same things to draw our family and extended family closer together.