Like many of you, I’ve been watching the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris and the other night I saw this interview with Gold Medalist Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone that I can’t get out of my head.
After talking to her about her previous Olympics experiences and winning the Gold Medal in the Women’s 400 Meter Hurdles (and breaking the World Record while doing it), the interviewer asked her what set her apart from all the other athletes in her field and this was her answer:
“Honestly, I think my faith was the biggest factor. Just trusting the Lord and trusting the plan He has for me. It doesn’t always guarantee things are going to go amazingly, but I just give all the honor and glory to Him every time I step on the track and I’m just amazed at what He’s doing in my life.”
Watch the clip HERE>
Now, I don’t mean to disparage or belittle Sydney’s faith in any way, and I certainly don’t intend this post to mock her or diminish her accomplishments.
She’s an amazing Olympic athlete who just set a new World Record in the 400 meter hurdles. So, let’s give her all the credit she deserves for that.
But, that’s sort of my point. She is the one who deserves the credit, not God. She’s the one who loves to run. She’s the one who devoted herself for years to get up early and train for hours and set her routine and watch her diet and enter the races and qualify for the opportunity to compete at the highest possible levels of athletic excellence.
Now, I understand that we, as human beings, tend to want to diminish ourselves as a way of exalting our deity of choice. At least, within Evangelical Christianity, this is drilled into our heads from a very young age.
Repeat after me: “We are worms. We are unworthy. God gets all the glory. Only God is good.”
So, when I heard Sydney say what she did about what sets her apart from everyone else in her field, I couldn’t help but mentally replace her deity with another to hear how it sounded:
“Honestly, I think my faith was the biggest factor. Just trusting in Zeus and trusting the plan He has for me. It doesn’t always guarantee things are going to go amazingly, but I just give all the honor and glory to Zeus every time I step on the track and I’m just amazed at what He’s doing in my life.”
Or, you could replace Zeus with Apollo, or Ganesha, or Shiva, or whomever you choose.
It wouldn’t change the substance of the statement, but it might help you to see how this answer to the question is more a statement of blind faith than it is an actual reason why she is the current world record holder for the 400 meter hurdles at this year’s Olympics.
Her statement raises many questions for me, like:
Did the other competitors just not have as much faith as she did?
Does God love Sydney more than those other competitors?
Were the various gods being prayed to by other athletes unable to help their devotees win the race?
I know that Sydney didn’t intend to suggest any of these things in her response, but intentional or not, those are the ideas we are left to assume if what she says is true.
Either her God is what gives her an extra advantage over other athletes, or her choice of Deity has nothing at all to do with the actual outcome of a physical competition where athletes are awarded based on their individual ability and performance.
I would argue that the object of her faith has nothing to do with the outcome.
Other than perhaps an unintended placebo effect where the person believes their God provides them with a supernatural boost that others don’t have access to, the person’s individual faith in a particular god has no bearing on that person’s ability to run faster than anyone else.
Now, if you’re offended that I’m suggesting that Sydney’s God had nothing to do with her Olympic Gold Medal performance the other day, let’s consider what you would think if someone else had broken the world record in the women’s 400 meter hurdles and had said in their interview with NBC that what set them apart from all the other athletes was their faith in Baphomet.
Would that convince you to convert to Hinduism and start praying to Baphomet? Would you suddenly believe that Baphomet was the one true God?
Probably not.
So, if Baphomet didn’t help one athlete to break a world record and win a gold medal at the Olympics, then Jesus didn’t either.
Let’s contrast Sydney’s Olympic experience with another American Olympian, Alison Gibson, who scored a Zero at the Olympics in Women’s High Diving after her foot accidentally hit the diving board during competition.
Here was her response after that unfortunate event:
“My faith has been challenged a lot through this and I don’t understand why God would let this happen to me as I have walked so faithfully with him over the past year, but I know his plans are greater than mine and it is not my duty to understand them.”
Would Alison Gibson’s foot have missed the diving board if she had placed her faith in some other Deity? Perhaps Poseidon or Dagon?
Or did she spend too much time practicing her dive when she should have been praying more to Athena?
See, this tendency to credit God for our accomplishments and blame God for our failures is highly unproductive.
No, God didn’t “allow” anyone to break a World Record.
They just did it.
No, God didn’t “let someone’s foot hit the diving board.”
It just did.
Things happen.
Sometimes we don’t understand why (like when an Olympic diver trains for years and their foot accidentally hits the diving board).
Sometimes we do (like when an Olympic athlete trains for their entire life and breaks a World Record).
But, either way, it’s not God who does or does not make those things happen.
Yes, faith is helpful if it allows us to love others more, but it’s not very helpful when it comes to sports, or engineering, or art, or any other area of human excellence or achievement where someone has to train, or study, or practice, or otherwise put in the time and energy necessary to become excellent at that skill.
Zeus and Apollo don’t help us find parking spaces. Ganesh and Shiva don’t help us win the lottery. Jesus and Mary don’t help us break world records.
Our belief in those things might impact the way we interpret events, but that belief doesn’t influence reality.
But God does have something to do with reality because we are the ones in whom God lives and moves and has being.
The Divine in you is what empowers you to do more than you thought you could and achieve more than you believed possible.
However, it’s not one specific Divine being “out there somewhere” in the heavens above that makes the difference. We all have different names for that God. We all tell different stories about that God. We mistakenly believe that our particular version of that God is the only one, or the best one, or the strongest one. But this is just branding.
There are over 800 different brands of bottled water, for example. Arguing that one brand is better than another is ridiculous. If you remove the label, it’s all just water.
And it’s the God in you that you mislabel and project outward into some preconceived religious construct that operates within you in ways you don’t fully understand.
Your brand of God is no better than another brand of God. If we remove the labels, it’s all just God.
[NOTE: I realize that some Gods really are toxic and a few are better than others. But, if we take this angle I would argue that Sydney’s God and Allison’s God might belong in the “toxic” category for drowning millions of people in a flood, ordering the slaughter of women and children, and allowing human slavery to flourish for a few thousand years.]So, I guess we can give credit to an external God for our own Divine successes, but that doesn’t prove that particular and individual aspect of God is better than anyone else’s.
It simply reveals that we’re still using primitive forms of religious language to express the transcendent reality of Divine Oneness that connects and unites all things and all people, regardless of our awareness of that Oneness.
Either way, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone is still one amazing athlete who deserves all the credit for her outstanding performance in the women’s 400 meter hurdles this week.
That’s true no matter which God we pray to, or give thanks to, or worship.
**
The newest book from Keith Giles, “The Quantum Sayings of Jesus: Decoding the Lost Gospel of Thomas” is available now on Amazon. Order HERE>
Keith Giles is the best-selling author of the Jesus Un series. He has appeared on CNN, USA Today, BuzzFeed, and John Fugelsang’s “Tell Me Everything.”
He co-hosts The God Squad podcast, and the Heretic Happy Hour Podcast.
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