Each one carries memories—football milestones, fishing team championships, seasons that once felt enormous in the moment. I’m grateful for every one of them and the people connected to them. But honestly, how SIGNIFICANT is any of it really?
I first started thinking deeply about that question back in 2005 after reading some Malcolm Muggeridge from Is There a God? At the time, I was still very much in the spotlight. Coaching consumed a huge part of my identity. Success, leadership, growth, achievement—all of it mattered deeply to me, probably more deeply than I realized then.
Muggeridge wrote:
“What living God? A being with whom one has a relationship, on the one hand, inconceivably more personal than the most intimate human one… on the other, so remote that in order to establish a valid relationship at all, it is necessary to die… and batter down one’s ego…”
That line hit me hard twenty years ago. It hits me even harder now.
Back then I mostly saw the intensity of discipleship. Today I think I understand more clearly what he meant about the ego. God has a way of patiently stripping away our need to be important. Not our purpose. Not our calling. But the subtle desire to be noticed, needed, admired, or central to the story.
Life has a way of changing your understanding of significance.
Muggeridge later wrote:
“Once the confrontation has been experienced—the rocky summit climbed, the interminable desert crossed—an unimaginably delectable vista presents itself…”
When I was younger, I read that almost triumphantly. The desert sounded dramatic and heroic. Now it sounds different to me. Deserts are stripping places. Summits can be lonely places. Time and disappointment and suffering have a way of sanding down the ego whether we want them to or not.
And strangely enough, I’m okay with that now. More than okay, honestly.
I still coach football. I still love the competition, the discipline, the relationships, the pursuit of excellence. But I’m no longer absorbed by it. There was a time when I probably needed the spotlight more than I understood. Now I find a lot of joy simply trying to be faithful somewhere a little farther back in the shadows.
“He must increase, but I must decrease.” (John 3:30)
Those words used to sound painful to me. Now they sound freeing.
The older I get, the more I realize how quickly most accomplishments fade. Football games are forgotten. Records get broken. Rings end up on a desk where grandchildren turn them into toys.
And yet somehow none of it is meaningless.
God was there in all of it. In the practices. In the wins and losses. In the conversations on buses and sidelines and hallways. In the quiet shaping of character and perseverance and faithfulness. He was doing deeper work than the trophies ever represented.
Maybe that’s the real irony of significance. The things we chase so hard often matter far less than we think, while the quiet work God is doing underneath it all lasts far longer than we can see.
Perhaps the real victory is becoming content to decrease a little, while trusting Christ to increase.
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