What's Your Endgame?
Recently, I was sitting at a local watering hole after a brutal 18 holes of Golden Tee video golf! I was crushed by my friend of some 30 years, a self-proclaimed “scratch” Golden Tee golfer, who had a very successful career as a C-suite business leader, now retired. To protect his identity, for purposes of this blog, we will call him “Dwight”. Dwight makes his spending money hustling Golden Tee video golf matches in the Northern Kentucky area these days.
As we laughed together and started talking about life and some of our passions and what we still wanted to accomplish in this life I, of course, continued to share with Dwight the direction that I envision Mighty Men moving in the future. He took a sip of his beer and turned away and asked me a very profound question, as only he can! “What is your endgame with Mighty Men?” I must admit, at first, I was caught off guard by his question. In a split second, inside my head, I heard myself shouting “what is my endgame!?!”. I responded to Dwight’s question this way: “To bless others and serve as many people as possible and to keep creating opportunities for men to develop a deeper relationship with God”. That’s a mouth full!
I believe that God has unique ways of reaching out to his people. This question, I believe, was one of those ways! This simple question challenged me and got me to really unpack this question and my feelings about it!
I have been challenge, in a positive way, by the Mighty Men leadership team, as to the direction of our group. I recently posted on the Mighty Blog “We Have a Dream”. I hope you will read it and let me know your thoughts on this post’s content. I will continue to dream big and methodically plan for those dreams to be realized as we move Mighty Men forward.
I as pondered about my endgame, I thought about the one “endgame” that really matters. What was Jesus’s endgame while he walked on this earth? There is a huge amount of theology wrapped up in this question for sure. I was challenged to dig a little deeper and came up with just one sentence that answered my question …”to continue to LOVE as fully as possible!” Whatever we are moving towards in life we should continue to make that commitment, time and time again, to love as fully as possible! Let me ask you a question now: do you feel at this point in your life that you are loving as fully as you possibly can? Are you interested in developing your ability to love more fully? How can we develop our ability to love more fully? These questions may seem to be overwhelming, but wait, that is why we hold Jesus up as the ultimate model of LOVE. He continued to love fully all the way to his death on the cross. No matter what the challenges are in our lives, real or perceived, we are called to fully love as Christ did.
Most people, it seems, reach some level of loving and feel content to say they’re at their perceived maximum level that they are capable of fully loving. Non-believers do this as well as many Christ followers. I will say that I believe this is living your life accidentally. If you have a plan to continue to be open to loving more fully you are living life intentionally. As a Christian your life plan is to follow Christ, as fully as you can. We do this because our role model is Jesus, who had no limits to his love, no matter what the circumstances. This invitation to “follow me” appears throughout the gospels. Jesus is inviting each of us to love more fully every day. You may agree, we don’t read the gospels just to find churchy quotes to share, rather we read the gospels to find Jesus! We will find Jesus and develop an understanding of loving more fully by truly reading the gospel message and finding Jesus there. Jesus is the endgame in life. As far as each of your endgame goes, brothers, let your life speak for itself. Ask yourself… what more can I do? Meet Jesus, maybe for the first time in the gospels and continue to challenge your own willingness to love more fully every day. Stretch your love limits to your wife, your children and grandchildren, your friends, neighbors and especially strangers and yes, even the invisible outcasts of society. We have a perfect role model to look to in Jesus.
Oh yes, one more thing, beware of any smooth-talking older guy asking you how does this Golden Tee golf video game thing work? You will thank me for it later!
~ Hammer