Playing For Keeps

My son and I were shooting hoops in the driveway this afternoon. I found the full-sized net on Craigslist and picked it up one night, sweating and bleeding getting it disassembled and in my car to earn my dad-of-the-year award for 2017, because I knew he wanted one. It's been a fun thing to have. I never played basketball growing up besides a pickup game here and there, and know nothing about form, so the two of us are about on the same skill level.

One thing I noticed, though: every time I kept focused on the square above the rim when I shot, it went in. I remembered that much coaching from little league: "Keep your eye on the ball." In contrast, every time I put up a free throw kind of just hoping it would land through the net, sometimes it did and most times it didn't.

St. Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians:

"Do you not know that in a race all the runners compete, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. Well, I do not run aimlessly, I do not box as one beating the air; but I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified." (1 Cor 9:24-27)

And in Proverbs, it is written:

"Let your eyes look directly ahead And let your gaze be fixed straight in front of you. Watch the path of your feet and all your ways will be established." (Prov 4:25-26)

The fact is, we do lose our focus on Christ from time to time. I have, and it can disorienting. It starts slowly...you eye catches something in the periphery, or flits to a distraction here or a thought there. This is how the devil leads us away from our Lord...a little bit at a time, the way frogs are boiled alive before the know the water has gone from warm to scalding. It is how the stage gets set in marriages for infidelity, drifting away a little bit each day, forgetting to connect a little bit at a time, until we wake up one day in separate beds. The important thing is to regain our vantage point--the cross--and bring it back into view. Focus on the cross, focus on the cross with tunnel vision.

We don't always remember the stakes of the game in our day-to-day. Fr. Lazarus El-Anthony, a modern day anchorite in the Egyptian desert does not have that luxury. As he notes in this rare interview:

"In one sense I am utterly alone (in the desert). If I want to talk to somebody, to whom can I talk? There is no one who understands my language. There is no one here who has my past, no one here who knows my thoughts. If I lose my contact with Christ for one minute, there is no one to come to help me. So this struggle I must fight every day to keep myself...balanced on Christ, balanced on the Lord."

All this is a round about way of saying: If you want to score with consistency in basketball, keep your eye on the square, and practice constantly. If you want to win the eternal prize in the only game that really matters, keep your eye on the cross, and pray without ceasing.