Rio 2016 The Best Of The Best

No. 2 - 14th August 2016

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been watching a lot of the Olympic games this week. It’s one of the perks of being retired. To me, the games really are a wonderful demonstration of what the human body can achieve. I just sit there completely astonished by the strength and beauty of their performances. I admire their skill and endurance, their speed and the absolute commitment to achieving the very best.

I’m reminded of the Passage that says, “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them. Male and female he created them… and God saw all that he had made, and it was very good”.

Just to watch young men and women at the very peak of their performance, fills me with admiration for what they are able to achieve. At times, they almost seem to achieve the impossible. We are indeed “fearfully and wonderfully made.”

As a young man, I used to think that I was rather good at swimming and diving. I even won the school swimming cup. But now, as I watch Michael Phelps and Tom Daley and all the others, I realise that my self assessment was ridiculous. It all depends who you’re measuring yourself against.

I think sometimes we measure ourselves, as human beings, against other human beings and think we really come out rather well. But in the long run, that’s not what we are going to be judged against. The standard is Jesus Christ. And set against him, there is no comparison.

The Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts”. “even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains an un-uprooted small corner of evil.” However good we think we are, the best of us fall a long way short of the mark that has been set by Jesus Christ.