The Problem with Being a Goldfish (Bot9 #341)
Ted Lasso is (or should be) everyone’s favorite coach. If he’s not, you’re just doing it wrong. His “fish out of water” story as a football coach leading a soccer club resonates across sport and presents so many great coaching ideas and principles for those of us in the industry.
A little more than a year ago, I took the Lasso-ism of “Be a goldfish” and used it as the failure mechanism with my team. Not only did it make sense to the players, I ended up being gifted with an aquarium of goldfish on my desk at the end of the season. They got it. They understood that they needed to have a short memory on the field when they made a mistake. They would eat goldfish crackers as a reminder after a mistake. It was effective and memorable.
But there’s a problem - this is one of those times when sport and life just aren’t the same. It’s effective and appropriate for an athlete, but the goldfish philosophy is incomplete in real life.
A few weeks ago I outlined one of my failures on this field (How do we react to failure? - Bot9 #338). In response to that recollection, my high school coach shared his perspective. He said this about my situation and another from his team this past summer:
“When my 7,8,9 hitters were all in similar situations on June 4th this year, with runners in scoring position, less than two outs, I remained calm, at least in appearance. The rational mind, slower at times, eventually takes over. Is forgiveness necessary? I don’t know, they or you, didn’t do anything wrong.”
In sports, when put in their proper perspective, the mistakes that occur on the field don’t require redemption. We might want to redeem those things inside our sport experience, but it’s not required. Because I had played sport with an improper perspective growing up, I felt like I had to make up for that mistake and any others I had made on the field. It provided me with a deep sense of motivation. Any time I came up short, I told myself I needed to make up for it somehow. I convinced myself that I had to have the production I did my senior year in order to redeem past mistakes. The problem with this? As coach said, I didn’t do anything wrong. Because I was attempting to make up for something in the past, I didn’t experience the joy and freedom that were there for me in competition. I hoped my works would cover my mistakes.
Those who know Christ understand this conflict. We know the tension that exists between faith and works, and how different faith traditions account for this. In many ways, the tangible sacrifices required in the Levitical law is easy to understand. If you do this wrong, here’s how to get back into right relationship with God and/or man. Commit this sin, transgression, or trespass, pay for it through a certain type of sacrifice. The mistake required something from us. We now know, on this side of the Messiah, that Leviticus was merely foreshadowing the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for our sins. Jesus died for those sins as a perfect sacrifice, covering our transgressions and providing us with the opportunity to live in right relationship with God.
This is certainly wonderful news as we all recognize our many imperfections. But I do wonder if the goldfish mentality prevalent in today’s society has made us lazy in seeking restoration with God and others. It seems that there is a connection between the idea of ‘cheap grace’ and being a goldfish. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession...” This plays out for those who lean on Jesus to restore the mistake without doing anything themselves. They just expect others to forgive their mistakes, no matter how egregious.
I’m certainly not advocating for all of us to walk around with deep senses of guilt and shame as I did after my strikeout in high school. But I am thinking Jesus intended for us to do something more than live like a goldfish. Loving God and loving your neighbor looks like a person who recognizes that God’s wrath has been resolved, but knows that our opportunities with one another are rich in this life. The offerings of asking for forgiveness instead of saying “I’m sorry,” sacrificing one’s ego for the sake of unity, and walking with humility and gratitude display our alignment with a Savior much greater than any of us.
This is how Christianity spreads - through social interaction and relationship. It doesn’t grow through information. We don’t live at Oxford in The Socratic Club led by C.S.Lewis (as fun as that would have been). We live in a broken world with broken people. We live with disjointed understandings of one another’s lives and imperfect applications of grace and mistakes. We live with the opportunity to engage deeply with one another. We’ve allowed the language of sport to infiltrate our theology instead of vice versa. Ted Lasso is great for entertainment and even some things that might help our teams succeed. Applying the Scriptures to our lives allows us to lives much more complete lives, especially as we learn to walk in grace and forgiveness with one another.