Keeping the Long View

As a fan of Liverpool Football Club, this has been a challenging year. With their fourth manager in the last four years, the storied Reds have not exactly been a model of stability (for that, take a look at the New England Patriots or Pittsburgh Steelers). But when 39-year-old Brendon Rogers was hired last summer, there was a stated commitment to stop the revolving door at Anfield. There was a commitment to set a path for the long haul—realizing the need to build the club’s foundation, developing young players and the academy program (like a baseball farm system). For that to succeed, the priority could not be to win immediately. Though winning is always important in any professional sport, the decision was to move away from the attempted quick-fix, short-term solutions of the past and to seek to build for the future, keeping the long view in mind at all times.

In any professional sport, shortsightedness is the enemy of long-term success. Band-aids may cover problems for a time, but they do not set the table for the future.

I think this can also speak to us about how we make decisions in life. Much of the time it seems that we are so immersed in the immediate moment that we fail to think of the long-term consequences or even, potentially, the eternal impact of the decisions we make. Wisdom says that we need to learn how to take the long view, to live life, as one writer put it, with “a long obedience in the same direction.” We see this long view a couple of different places in the Hebrews 11 “Hall of Faith.” First, we see: “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off were assured of them, embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Heb. 11:13).

Secondly, we see:

And what more shall I say? For the time would fail me to tell of Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jephthah, also of David and Samuel and the prophets: who through faith subdued kingdoms, worked righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, became valiant in battle, turned to flight the armies of the aliens. Women received their dead raised to life again. And others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection (vv. 32-35).

“Afar off.” “A better resurrection.” In both cases, decisions were being made based on the long view, not the expediency of the moment. Many of them paid a tremendous price for that long view, but living with eternity in mind was worth the cost. God has created us to have “eternity in [our] hearts” (Eccles. 3:11). We would be wise to allow eternity to guide us as we live in the moment.

Bill Crowder, Sports Spectrum Chaplain

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Categories: Soccer

Tags: endurance, eternity, wisdom