The Loser's Circle

We've known each other since high-school. She the pretty and popular one, I the frumpy and foolish one. She laughs large and lives large and everything she does is punctuated by drama and publicity. We were opposites and friends. Our friendship ebbed and flowed through the years; we have never been close, but we've always had a pulse on the other's life, known a bit of their struggles and joys. We've wept and laughed together and occasionally been angry with one another. I love her.

We've shared something, too, that united us in more ways than one. There was a pattern that every time I liked a guy, she liked him too. The difference between us was that the guys liked her back. As soon as I knew I would have to compete with her for their attention, I stepped back, gave up. I knew I couldn't win. And indeed haven't. She dated the guys I liked, and eventually married one, while I just watched, my heart mourning in silent.

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My name means Laurel Crowned, or Victor, so you would think competition would be normal and natural to me. I am built of candoitiveness and a serious determination to never fail. But whenever countered, I become a palms-up, shrugged-shoulders, give-over sort of loser. The victor who is happy to come in last.

For a long time I thought this was because The First Shall Be Last and other proof-texts we use to make the good guys still feel good, but I'm coming to see it for what it is: pride. The girl who doesn't mind coming in last doesn't mind as long as someone crowns her Victor of Coming in Last.

But there is a kind of losing that can put you in the winner's circle too.

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There's a new ad circulating called Like a Girl. Whatever you think about the ad or a culture that encourages girls to be like boys, there's one line in it that gives me chills: "I run like a girl because I am a girl," and then she knocks it out of the park.

What she is saying is not that she loses to what she is, but that she relinquishes the demand on her to be like something she is not. She is a girl and so she runs like one—and she runs fast and free, unbridled by stereotypes and caricatures. She is herself.

The other night a group of friends and I stayed up too late for a bunch of 30 somethings. We talked about personality types and calling, and one commented that too often we want to be something we are not: the introvert wants to be the extrovert and the thinker wants to be the funny one, and so on. That wasn't me though. I have never wanted to be the opposite of me. I just want all these knots and knolls in my heart to be better, faster, stronger. For most of my life that meant I competed against myself, but within the gospel's context, I simply want to be conformed to the likeness of Christ—to proclaim Him just as He made me.

Christ didn't make me my high-school friend and he didn't make me a fast runner or an extrovert. He knit me together with these gifts and proclivities, these inclinations and drives, this body and these ideas. Those were his gifts to me and it's not losing to be them, fully and wholly conforming to him as I embody his image.

When I lose to the world's expectations of me, I win to Christ's design for me.

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified. I Corinthians 9:24-27