Admirable

Last week, Bulgaria lost to Slovakia 82-0 in a women's hockey game. You can read about here. That's right 82-0. I'm not a hockey fan. I've only been to a few minor league games and one Carolina Hurricanes game in person. I've tried to watch it on TV a few times. But I always have problems following the puck around (even when they had the weird blue glow on them). Plus, I'm not very familiar with the rules and strategy. So usually the only excitement that I have at hockey games are the fights and the goals. The best games were always 10-9 games with a couple of 30-45 second scrums on the ice.

When I read the 82-0 score, I started thinking what it must have been like to be on that Bulgarian team. Demoralizing. Demeaning. Depressing. Then I dug deeper and realized it was worse than the score indicated. Yep! Worse. They were outshot 139-0. 139-0! That means the Bulgarians skated around on the ice for 60 minutes and never once got a shot at the goal. Plus, they lost the first two games in the tournament by scores of 30-1 and 41-0. Finally, they were outscored in the tournament 192-1.

It makes me wonder why the Bulgarians even showed up for the tournament. At the very least why show up for the last game after you've been outscored 110-1 in the rest of the tournament? Then when it was 31-0 at the end of the first period of the game, why not wave the white flag, go to Fuddruckers and get a hamburger? Didn't someone on the team see the insanity of playing a game when you couldn't get a shot on the other team's goal nor could you stop the other team from scoring at will?

If we look hard enough, we can always find a reason to give up and quit playing or working or striving. We've all had days or weeks or months where nothing seemed to go right, where we spent the entire time futilely trying the stop the other side from scoring, where we couldn't even get a shot against the competition no matter how hard we tried. We've all had times in our spiritual journey when we've battled apathy, or found it hard to hear from God or struggled because we feel inadequate in our faith. Well, at least I've had those times. Thankfully, we serve a God who never gives up on us. No matter the score. There are a lot of perseverance quotes out there. Google them if you want to spend some time browsing them. But this is my favorite.

-- peace, jamie

ps - Unfortunately for the Bulgarian women's hockey team, perserverance didn't help them out at their tournament. With their losses, they were eliminated from 2010 Olymipics. Better luck next time, ladies.