Irrational Confidence (Bot9 #284)
My best trait as a player was irrational confidence. I’m not sure if I brought much else to the table, honestly. I was tall and lanky, my arm was really good until a rotator cuff injury, I could turn any triple into a double due to poor speed, and I only had enough power to produce doubles and not home runs. Externally, there wasn’t much to work with outside of a big frame. Internally, though, there was a lot in the tank.
I figured out how to believe in myself. Don’t get me wrong, I had periods where I struggled with confidence like anyone else, but when I got on top of it, I knew how to stay there. In spite of limited physical tools, I could make the best of them with absurd levels of belief that I could do it. When I stepped to the plate in that state of mind, no one was getting me out.
This continued into my life as a coach. I remember sharing with someone important to me early in my coaching and teaching career that I was going to be one of the best coaches in the state. When that person told me they didn’t believe I could accomplish that goal, that person no longer had a place in my life. But having irrational confidence in yourself does you little good unless you can transfer it to your players. I hope that’s something the players I’ve coached can say that I’ve done for them.
Irrational confidence might also be called faith. That might make some uncomfortable, but go with me for a second. We are not able to see anything we hold on to in the faith. Hebrews 11:1 tells us that “faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” 2 Corinthians 5:7 explains that “we walk by faith, not by sight.” If we could see them, it might not be faith. Now, I’m not discounting or minimizing the rational components of our faith, those conclusions to which we can arrive with reason and logic. Those are important. But I think the things we can’t see or explain are what make our faith incredible.
Many archaeologists, scientists, and secularists work to discredit not only the existence of God but the Bible as well. If you read the story of Jesus, let alone the whole Bible, there is a lot that’s hard to swallow for the overly rational. A virgin birth. Blind people that can see. People who were paralyzed can walk again. Demons are exorcized. Thousands are fed. People are raised from the dead. And, Jesus himself, after being brutally executed, rises after three days in the tomb and appears to many, many people. Though the accounts of the apostles who spread the word of these happenings in the early church, we get the opportunity to believe. But Paul outlines how Christ’s death is representative of God’s power and wisdom in 1 Corinthians 1:18-25:
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written:
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”
Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
I love that Paul’s word for irrational is ‘foolishness.’ That’s the kind of faith we need, both in God and in ourselves. We need to have foolish, irrational confidence. Just as I used to have that kind of confidence in myself on the field, I’ve got even more in God. I believe that God spoke to me in a still, small voice twice in my life. It led me to my wife and where we live today. In this moment of social distancing and the spread of the coronavirus, I have the irrational confidence that God will rescue us now as well. This is what we have to hold on to and lean into at this point in history. Our unshakeable confidence in our Lord must be what guides us through as He heals the world.