If he told me once, he told me enough times that this one line has tried for decades to take up permanent residency in my head: 

“Only play the games you know you can win.” 

But how I’d like a dime for every time I’ve wanted to ask that man I knew a long time ago: 

But what do you do, and where do you go, when all you seem to do is lose? Lose people you love, lose the story you thought your life would be, lose badly at being the way you long to be? 

“I’ve got this haunting voice in my head that I’m not the best at all the things I’ve got to do,” a woman told me in passing last week. 

Spend your one life relentlessly only trying to climb higher on some ladder, and your soul runs out of oxygen and your joy can’t really breathe.  This is the stress of Climber’s Distress. 

I could see it in her eyes because you can see it everywhere, the pressure deeply immense and intense:

Have the best romancing love-life, have the best, knock-out achievements, have the best Instagrammable dream house, have the best fairy-tale life. You have to win at all the things, if you want to amount to anything. 

This can be exhausting. This noise can get loud between your ears in the middle of the night: 

If you’re not on a certain rung of the ladder by now, how does your life matter by other’s standards? 

When you aren’t where you thought you’d be in your life, are you who you hope to be accepted in other people’s minds? What if low-grade disappointment with how your story’s going – is making your soul sicker than any low-grade fever that goes on forever? 

No matter what the hustle gurus say, the tried and true Way across the ages testifies: Spend your one life relentlessly only trying to climb higher, and your soul runs out of oxygen and your joy can’t really breathe.  

This is the stress of Climber’s Distress. 

This is a stress every soul is susceptible to, because we all begin in the same place:

Every single one of us is born looking for someone — something, anything — to fill this empty hunger within… so we begin climbing. Because we think if we climb higher than where we are now, climb higher than others, climb to be the best at something, then we will finally find what we’re looking for – find someone looking deeply into us, find someone fully loving all of  us – which will fill the emptiness. So we keep climbing, hustling to try to find it before anyone else. 

Focus only on climbing ladders and you climb out of all potential joy and right into certain disappointment.  Climber’s Distress is cured by kneeling down to love. Your soul can always breathe easier when you kneel down and sacrifice for someone. 

But  no matter how high you climb, no matter how you try to be the best, the truth is: 

Nothing you find on any ladder can ever fulfill real emptiness. 

The reality is: Every time you think you’re not yet on a high enough rung on your ladder, you end up feeling low, and it’s your own joy that gets wrung right out. 

Focus only on climbing ladders and you climb out of all potential joy and right into certain disappointment.  

It’s Climber’s Distress that causes stress cracks across our days, our hearts, our life. 

Souls aren’t meant to climb ladders; soul are meant to be dead to the climbing of ladders and go lower to be sacrificial love. Whatever you’re looking for won’t ever be found on any ladder but is only  found in lowering yourself to serve.

Everywhere that you kneel down and serve someone, love someone, sacrifice for someone, you’ll finally find right there what you’ve been looking for: fulfillment. 

It’s a strange and holy paradox, and this is what hushes the worry that we’re somehow falling behind:

Climber’s Distress is cured by kneeling down to love. Your soul can always breathe easier when you kneel down and sacrifice for someone. 

After all kinds of loss these last few year, if there was a wayI could sit down with that man who told me “Only play the games you know you can win” – I think I’d gently find his eyes and tenderly tell him now: 

Life isn’t about being the best, life is about being love. 

Life isn’t about climbing to the top of your field, but about loving how you get to be on the field at all. If you think life is mostly about the joy of winning, you’re missing out on the joy of simply living.

Life isn’t about being the best, life is about being love. Life isn’t about climbing to the top of your field, but about loving that you get to be on the field at all.

You don’t have to be the best in whatever field; the point is you get to be on the field in this moment at all, that you get the grace of feeling the wind in your hair and the wondrous grace of being alive with breath in your lung and sun on your face and the hands of your people there at your back, and you get the grace to be out there on the field of all the living where the grass is greener than on the other side of the fence with its graves. 

Feeling entitled to more can end up only leaving you more discouraged; it’s when you have a sense of entitlement, that you can lose all sense of direction toward joy. 

And honestly? Your worst day would be, in many ways, someone else’s best day. What you consider your failure, someone else may consider their finest, and the woman who doesn’t make her finish line like she wanted, is she really a failure when others would give their eye teeth to even just get that far? 

Whatever you think you aren’t doing well, someone else would be wildly grateful just to get to do at all.

For every single one of us, life is truly complicated and nuanced and no one is interested in toxic gratitude that poisons our very real need to lament. Every one of our griefs and wounds and loss are very real and deep and daily, and for all of us: our gratefulness can’t nullify our griefs, nor can our gratefulness negate our very honest griefs, but all grief and gratefulness, in turn, inform each other, and together, they both form us authentically human. 

Tulips bloom blush pink in these early May days.

Flickers flash their scarlet feathers on back lawns, and stumbling, flailing women like this one make dinner tired over old stoves.

No matter what the grass looks like on the other side of the fence, as long as you’re on this side of the grass today, this moment is an astonishing gift of grace.

No matter what the grass looks like on the other side of the fence, as long as you’re on this side of the grass today, this moment is an astonishing gift of grace.

What would it look like to be content with all the kind ways of your Creator — instead of comparing yourself to the ways of all kinds of content creators? 

And what I keep discovering when I dare open my gratitude journal, choose to pick up a pen, even in the messy and failings of every day life is that: When you’re sitting with tender losses but Jesus’ heart has won yours forever, there is always something – the richest eternal and permanent things — to be infinitely thankful for. 

This feels like the best kind of winning: 

What cures Climber’s Distress is kneeling down in gratitude for all that still is. 

What cures Climber’s Distress is loving all that God has bent down to give. 

Why ever tire of writing down thanksgiving for all His gifts of grace, when thanksgiving genuinely proves to be the most life-giving? 

• Early May days
• Blush pink petals 
• Light in eyes and honest smiles 
• Loving the person right in front of me
• Getting to be and breathe out on the field of life today at all
• The gift of now and all the hope and possibility of even this moment right here 

It’s a strange wonder how that can happen, how when you lose entitlement, you can win joy, how giving thanks for the gifts of grace right here, and getting to be at all, gives space for joy to move in and take up permanent residency in your heart. 

And the blush pink tulips out in the May flowerbeds never stress with climbing higher, but at the end of the day, as the sun lowers itself, I can see from the window how they simply bow their heads with thanks and everything looks best in a grateful light.

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