Practice Makes ... Better

Have you been watching the Olympics?  It’s about to kill me; not the drama of the competition or the hyperbole of the announcers, but getting up to go to work in the morning after staying up late watching what I have recorded because I don’t have 14 spare hours a day to watch the Olympics!

I have to admit my preference toward objective victories like crossing the finish line or touching the wall first. I get bored, and frustrated, quickly with anything that requires judges.  But I remember an amazing Olympic moment that took the world by storm when a petite Romanian gymnast made the first perfect score in Olympic history.

It was the summer of 1976 and the Olympics were in Montreal.  Nadia Comaneci was an introverted and intensely focused fourteen-year-old who had taken up gymnastics at age six.  In the opinion of the sporting world she was an amazing athlete.  In my opinion, being fourteen myself in the summer of ’76, she was also pretty cute.

When she scored her first “perfect” 10 on the uneven bars, the scoreboard showed 1.00 because it was designed with only one digit to the left of the decimal.  The “perfect” 10 was unthinkable!  Nadia went on to score six more of them. 

Was she perfect?  Nadia herself says she could have been better.  In 1997, the International Gymnastics Federation changed the scoring system so there is no longer a possibility of a “perfect” score.

“Practice makes perfect.”  Most of us have heard that at some point in our lives, usually when we were tired of doing the same thing over and over again. The reality is that no matter how hard we try or how much we practice, there is always room for improvement.

Frank Perretti is one of my favorite authors. In his latest book, Illusion, one of the characters states, “Practice doesn’t make perfect, but it does make better.” 

In real life, there is no “perfect”.  There is only better.  The goal is to be a fraction better today that we were yesterday. That’s why world class athletes, musicians, speakers, and technology developers spend thousands of hours achieving private victories before the public results are seen.  And that’s why they continue to practice even after the crowd cheers their accomplishments.

Philippians 4:8-9 says, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me — put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you."

In other words, get your mind and heart focused and put that right thinking into practice over and over again. Our lives matter so much to God that he doesn’t want us to be satisfied with applause.  He wants us to keep moving forward.

Enough reading for now.  Get back to the “gym” and practice.