"I start early and I stay late, day after day, year after year. It took me 17 years and 114 days to become an overnight success." — Lionel Messi
"Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends." — Jesus
Depending on your age, it used to be the 'self-help' section of Barnes & Noble. But now — spend a couple minutes on the right section of the internet and you’ll be overwhelmed by the amount of information and advice coming your way. Betterment, productivity, a new hack. A tip, a trick, a way to cut a corner and get ahead.
But one of the reasons we love athletes is that there is no shortcut. We have no delusion about any part of it. To become great in the world of athletics, there is no hack. It requires loss and sacrifice.
It took Messi 17 years and change to make his professional debut — and that was just the beginning of a career filled with hard work and sacrifice.
He lost friends. He lost home. He left his family and his country as a boy. A lifetime of that loss added up to something the whole world stops to watch. Anyone who has seen him move across the pitch can tell you: it is genuinely beautiful.
But if you look closer, it's not just Messi who has loss in the story.
His parents gave up years of living alongside their son. They sacrificed money to send him to an academy across the ocean. Coaches stayed up late and got up early — emptying themselves into a kid who might one day become great. And here's the thing about that second kind of loss: it's much quieter.
None of those people were chasing a trophy. They weren't winning anything. They were spending themselves so that someone else could flourish. Advice to live like that doesn't as often rise to the top of the NYT Bestseller list, but when we see it, it moves us. It's the love of a mother going without so her kids don't have to. We can't always explain why it hits us so deep — but it does.
Jesus had something to say about this kind of loss. He didn't just talk about it. He lived it.
The man who claimed to be God descending into our world. Born into a barn, raised among an occupied people group. During his ministry years, he had no home and surrendered every right and privilege he could have rightfully claimed. He got on his knees and took the place of a servant. Eventually, he lost his life, too.
But notice how far Jesus took it. Messi's parents poured themselves out for their own son. Jesus poured himself out for strangers — for outcasts and enemies, even — who could never pay him back.
Our culture teaches us to be self reliant. To focus on our own lives and what we need. It might seem like safety and security, but it’s actually isolating. If we never risk anything for those around us, our relationships stay shallow and untested. The ‘self’ we spend our whole lives preserving turns out to be fragile. A person who never gives anything away never finds out what they're made for. We weren't built to be hoarded, we were built to be spent.
Jesus invites us into that way of living. He says that the path to flourishing is actually the one marked by loss and focus on others. Love always asks us to give something of ourselves—our time, attention, comfort, preferences, pride, freedom, or even our lives.
"For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it."
Love requires loss. It costs something, and that cost reveals its value. There is no hack for real love.
Who and what and where are you willing to lose so that others can benefit?
Where can you sacrifice so that love and beauty can grow?
It will be hard. Certainly.
But this month, this World Cup, the entire globe is TRANSFIXED by the beauty of lives lived through sacrifice. Of young men who have sacrificed so much in order to be where they are and the countless unseen who are part of their journeys.
The non-sports world is transfixed by sacrificial lives, too. The Gandhi's and MLK's. The Rosa Parks and Mother Teresa's and millions of nameless mothers who put their children's needs before their own.
Somewhere down in our guts, we want to be like them. But it's scary. We're worried if we have what it takes. We don't know if we can actually lose ourselves and still live a life of satisfaction.
But Jesus is saying that, actually, the only path to deep satisfaction is a life lived in sacrificial love to others.
If we live for ourselves, we'll miss it.
"Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends."
Easier said than done, but the good news is that we don't have to do it on our own. What if Jesus could strengthen us and has already led the way?