"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play…it is war minus the shooting."
Peace
You will keep in perfect peace all who trust in you, all whose thoughts are fixed on you! Trust in the LORD always, for the LORD GOD is the eternal Rock. Isaiah 26:3,4When I have asked elite athletes what I could pray for them, the most common request is “Peace”. When you live in a performance-centred world, where your sporting worth is determined by your last performance, how do you continue to believe that your worth is based on your relationship with God? It doesn’t help that for track and field athletes, every result – even the embarrassing ones – are recorded for posterity on the web!
How do you find peace when it’s all going wrong? Rudyard Kipling’s poem IF describes the situation as keeping your head “when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you”.
Isaiah promises not just peace but “perfect peace”. The peace is available to all who trust in God. And in case you missed it, Isaiah repeats it in the next line: “Trust in the LORD always”.
The image of God as “the eternal Rock” is striking. Rocks are amazing. Sometimes just looking at an enormous rock in a remote place and thinking that it has been there for millions of years, helps put things in perspective. But God is not just a rock but “the eternal Rock”.
Life can be so unpredictable, never more so than last year and a bit. Remember that God is the eternal Rock and that he is the only one who can give you perfect peace.