Our Score In Life Isn't Always What We'd Hoped For, Is it?

In the last few months I've re-started my bowling career. Okay, so it was never a career but I did okay for a lot of years back in high school. I'd bowl with my cousin in the summer for 25 cents a game and we'd bowl eight games. We were big spenders then and bowling was very popular. I even had a couple of games over 200, which if you're not a bowler, you don't know is pretty good.

Very good, however, is when you bowl that most every game.

And when I was bowling more regularly, there was tournament bowling on TV every weekend. Even the average non-bowler person knew the names of at least some of the best pros. Can you name any of the top five in bowling today? Probably not, though in the current bowling world they're already superstars. There are major tournaments all through the fall and spring, many now on TV reprised on YouTube, with the only major break over the summer.

And those competitions use terms like World Series, Championship, Leagues and a host of other high level titles.

So after quite a few decades, I got a new taste of bowling going with four of our grandboys and parents. It was a lot of fun but I quickly knew that I was going to have to get more serious about it than those periodic outings as great as they are. So I actually got my own ball again, shoes that fit and began to get to the lanes once or twice a week. I'm working on taking a few lessons because, well, I need them badly.

However, when I go to practice on my own, which is usually early in the morning when the lanes open, I'm often in the building with only one or two other bowlers. And there are eighty lanes! Sometimes I'm bowling for the first thirty minutes as the only bowler in the place. It's just me and the guy oiling the lanes anywhere close to the pins. Yes, I've probably needed to get out more.

But I've also noticed while trying to re-start and re-develop my talent that the facilities also have new monitors, scoreboards and ways of summarizing your game, keeping track of your percentages of strikes, spares, ten pins and whether I've taken my anti-rejection meds. Well, maybe they don't measure that last one but the anti-rejection part would be huge.

In fact, it took me two times to just figure out how to turn my monitor and lane on so I could actually bowl. However, get this. There is an option on the screen below your game total that says "Edit Scores."

Wow, what a concept! Apparently I could doctor the sheet they're going to email to me later and make my totals look so much better! Wouldn't it be great if life were like that? Just touch a button and change our bad numbers so our grades in school improved, our boss liked us more, our family forgot about all our weaknesses and mistakes, people in the community thought we were the best and any skill we had became world-class.

But instead, there is no button like that and maybe that's a good thing. Because think about it. What would be our tendency if we could actually, "edit our scores." My thinking is that we wouldn't work as hard or at all doing a lot of things. Why? Because we could change the outcome whether we did well or not. Why work at it?

Suppose the medical people who care for us so well did that and chose not to learn as much or prepare well because they could always look better when they edited their score?I'm pretty sure I don't want my airline pilots doing that either.

And if we could always doctor the outcomes in our favor or make the journey simpler, we wouldn't become as strong emotionally, spiritually, physically or intellectually. Our tendency would probably be to take the easy way and as a result never live up to our God-given potential or have the resources to overcome life's challenges.

In the Bible's New Testament, Paul, once an ardent persecutor of Christ followers, said in Romans 8:18, "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us." In other words, hardships can always produce goodships down the road. Editing our scores won't help but just keep us average or less.

James 1: 2-4 also adds, "Count it all joy when you face trials of many kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance . . . so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything."

So, when I barely bowl 100 one game, leave pins that should have fallen and miss the one pin left in the middle of the lane, that could be a good thing? Yes, though not always enjoyable in the moment. But the best thing we can do is use our poor "score" to get us to work harder, practice, make progress and not be like everyone else, but rather to become all we were meant to be.

We're not being "scored" compared to others. We must only score ourselves against one person. Us. Because God made us and He's the one who knows what we're best at doing and being. He's the coach and the only one in your bowling alley with 80 lanes.