Tag: faith

Faith and Fundamentals

On January 20, 2019, the New England Patriots and the Kansas City Chiefs faced off for the right to go to the Super Bowl.

This was familiar territory for New England. It was the Patriots’ eighth straight appearance in the American Football Conference Championship Game, and their 13th in 18 years. Patriots Quarterback Tom Brady had been under center for the entire run, and by now, he was considered the game’s greatest all-time player.

Kansas City, on the other hand, had not made it this far in the playoffs in 25 years. Yet, Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes – in his first season as a starter – had outplayed Brady. Mahomes had thrown for 5,000 yards and 50 touchdowns, and he would later be named the National Football League’s Most Valuable Player.

The Chiefs had also won more games than the Patriots over the course of the season. So, Kansas City had the opportunity to host the contest.

All of this led to a changing-of-the-guard narrative. Brady’s legendary run was seemingly nearing its end. It was Mahomes’ turn now.

But those prognostications proved premature. It was the Patriots who prevailed in overtime.

New England would go on to win its sixth Super Bowl a couple of weeks later. Yet, the buzz remained on the team they’d outlasted on the frigid Missouri plains.

The Mahomes era was imminent. The Chiefs would be back.

Looking back at this moment, less than a decade later, this all appears so quaint.

These days, the Kansas City Chiefs are the pre-eminent franchise in football. And Patrick Mahomes is the face of the NFL.

The team has been to six more AFC Championship Games since that overtime setback. They’ve advanced to five of the past six Super Bowls, winning three championships.

The Chiefs gained pop culture status, thanks to tight end Travis Kelce’s engagement to Taylor Swift. And Mahomes has taken home a second MVP award – while appearing in countless commercials.

Brady didn’t exactly fade into the background during Kansas City’s dynasty. He moved from New England to Tampa Bay to finish out his career. And he actually beat Mahomes and the Chiefs in a Super Bowl at the end of his first season with the Buccaneers.

But the proverbial torch-pass had clearly been passed.

So yes, the pundits were right.

It was inevitable that someone with Mahomes’ talent and competitiveness would dominate the league. It was just the natural order of things.

Or was it?

On the night when Brady and Mahomes faced off in that AFC Championship Game, I was on a flight back from Miami to Dallas.

The football teams in both those cities – the Miami Dolphins and the Dallas Cowboys – have suffered cascades of disappointment for decades. But the Dolphins’ plight is particularly severe.

Miami was once the toast of the NFL. The Dolphins won two consecutive Super Bowls in the early 1970s, and the 1972 squad was the only team to go unbeaten through the regular season and playoffs.

As the decade wore on, the Pittsburgh Steelers became the league’s new “it” team, winning four Super Bowls in six years. But by the time the early 1980s rolled around, Miami was ascendant – thanks to a quarterback named Dan Marino.

Much like Mahomes, Marino burst onto the scene in the NFL. In his first full season as a starter, he threw for 5,000 yards and 48 touchdowns – winning an MVP award in the process.

Marino led Miami to the AFC Championship game that season, and he proceeded to shred the Steelers vaunted defense in that game. However, in the ensuing Super Bowl, the Dolphins fell to the San Francisco 49ers.

It was a disappointing end to a stellar season. Yet, most of the fans and media in South Florida remained upbeat. It seemed it would only be a matter of time before Marino led Miami back to the Super Bowl.

But that return trip never came.

Even as he rewrote the NFL record books throughout his Hall of Fame career, Marino would never win a Super Bowl ring with the Dolphins. And Miami has fallen off even more since his retirement a quarter century ago. The team hasn’t even won a playoff game in that time.

All the elements present in Mahomes were inherent in Marino. But the story had a vastly different ending – for both player and team.

Why is that?

American football is a strange sport.

Despite its name, it relies far more on a player’s hands than their feet. And the ball that players handle is more oblong than round.

This means that there are plenty of chances for strange bounces, particularly when the ball is knocked free or kicked. Those bounces can determine the fate of a game, a season, or a career.

Tom Brady was a beneficiary of one of these bounces. Late in his first playoff game with New England, he appeared to fumble the ball away to the Oakland Raiders. But the referees ruled that Brady had lost the ball while attempting to pass, thereby nullifying the turnover. The Patriots went on to win that game, sparking a run to their first Super Bowl championship.

Mahomes and the Chiefs have also been the recipients of good fortune – lucky bounces, favorable calls, and missed opportunities for the opposition. Some have cried foul about these breaks, claiming a conspiracy. But these calls have no merit.

You see, luck is a great determinant of legacy in just about any corner of life. Talent and a good work ethic can set us up for success, but favorable winds help glide us into position.

Those bounces that determine our fate are beyond our control. There is no genie to summon, no token to cash in. We must do the best we can, while hoping that our efforts will yield the outcomes we seek.

The truth is that Dan Marino was not less of a quarterback than Patrick Mahomes or Tom Brady. He just didn’t get the bounces that they did. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Indeed, Marino – a Catholic – relied on his faith to guide him through his football career. In his Football Hall of Fame speech, he recounts playing for a parochial school team in Pittsburgh during his middle school years.

Before each game, the team would go to church and pray for victory. And victory always came.

Of course, that faith didn’t lead Marino to an undefeated pro career, and it didn’t net him a Super Bowl ring. But that faith – along with fundamentals like talent and work ethic – still allowed him to realize his childhood dream. And it still enabled him to take the quarterback position to new heights.

Faith, it seems, is still worth having.

We’d all be wise to follow the lead of Dan Marino. We should try to balance fundamentals and faith.

This concept doesn’t come naturally in our society. We’re primed to either tie results to core attributes or to chalk everything up to luck. There’s rarely a lane for both.

But it’s time for us to make one.

For the by the book approach has a limited odometer in life. Airtight processes and sweat equity might point us in the right direction, but they guarantee us nothing.

It takes something beyond our grasp to get us over the top. Good fortune. Magic. Divine Intervention. Whatever we want to call it, we need it.

We can do better than to deny this basic fact. We must do better.

So, let’s make that shift.

Let’s commit to putting in the work. But let’s remember to keep the faith.

The Paradox of Trust

A friendly face.

It’s a lifeline.

When we’re faced with novelty, a friendly face can make all the difference.

Friendly is familiar. And familiarity can cut through the jitters of uncertainty.

So, we seek out a friendly face at any opportunity. We seek to build a stable of people we can trust.

We believe that we’re setting ourselves up for success by doing this. But we could be booking a one-way ticket to trouble instead.

I’ve often been described as trustworthy.

Many times, I get this feedback directly. Sometimes I see it through the actions of others.

I take this accolade as an honor and a responsibility.

While it’s great to have others believe in me, I know I can’t rest on my laurels. I must work continually to validate that trust.

For trust is not a rubber stamp. It’s a contract.

If I fail to deliver on my end of that contract, it evaporates. I lose the goodwill of family, friends, and associates. And I end up hurt, perhaps irreparably.

And if I abuse the contract entirely — blatantly violating its terms for my own gain — it ignites. I lose the goodwill of family, friends, and associates when the truth comes to light. And they end up hurt, perhaps irreparably.

Yes, what builds us up can also tear us down.

And so, I am deliberate when it comes to trust. I strive to model trustworthy behavior, but I don’t overtly seek out the trust of others.

I simply put myself in a position to earn that label. And once I receive it from someone, I work extra hard to maintain it.

The stakes are too high to act otherwise.

Confidence artists.

We have a complicated relationship with them.

We love it when our favorite characters on the silver screen are putting on a ruse. But we loathe seeing such sequences play out in real life.

The gap between these two examples might seem stark. But they’re closer together than we might want to admit.

Whether it’s James Bond or Bernie Madoff, confidence artists draw from the same well — our sense of trustworthiness, and our unwillingness to question it.

And while it’s easy to trivialize those victimized by confidence schemes — labeling them as the naïve, the uber-rich, or the movie villains who had it coming — such dissonance misses the point.

All too often, we play fast and loose with the concept of trustworthiness. We hand over the keys to the Rolls Royce that is our life. And we just expect the valet in its charge not to go joyriding with it.

We hope that everyone’s better angels will shine through. But what if they don’t?

We have no contingency plan for the devil in our midst. We head out into the chaos of the world without an inch of armor. And the results are predictably tragic.

Perhaps it’s time to change the calculus.

My parents are both educators.

Ever since I was a child, they’ve been entrusted with the well-being of schoolchildren. During the busiest part of the day, they share a classroom – with no parents in sight.

This alone isn’t noteworthy. Or it shouldn’t be.

After all, the school system has been set up this way in America for two centuries. We entrust educators with our kids, no questions asked.

But recently, things have changed.

Revelations of physical abuse in the classroom by teachers have shattered any sense of trust. Schools have had to face tough questions about how they operate.

This has impacted my parents. They’re consummate professionals who have proven worthy of the trust bestowed upon them. But they now face a bevy of regulations and restrictions that impact how they teach.

There’s no question that these changes were needed. The old method of blind trust allowed predators to lie in plain sight, and plenty of lives were ruined in the balance.

Still, the current climate in classrooms isn’t exactly sustainable either. Education can’t happen in a trust vacuum, with all its mechanisms eroded away.

The solution lies somewhere in the middle, in the gray area between carte blanche and a surveillance state.

And it’s there, in the fog and the mist, where the path forward is so difficult to navigate.

Trust but verify.

Back when I worked in television news, I internalized these three words.

Speed was the name of the game. Getting the scoop, being the first to report — that meant everything.

But accuracy was the name of the game too. Putting the wrong information out there could get you in a boatload of trouble.

Choosing between these two edicts wasn’t an option. So, I went with the trust but verify approach.

Essentially, our news operation would implicitly trust the information we came across. But we’d still check with a second source to verify that intel, ensuring it was accurate.

This trust but verify approach speaks to the paradox of trust. We need it, but we can only rely on it so much.

There’s no true guidebook for this paradox. There’s no silver bullet that leverages the upside of trust without exposing us to those nasty downsides.

The best we can do is to approach the situation with eyes wide open. To lean into our vulnerability and to prepare ourselves for the worst outcomes.

We can do this by honoring the trust placed in us. Instead of taking this goodwill for granted, we can act to validate it day in and day out.

And when it comes to the trust we place in others, we can take our time. Instead of diving right in, we can verify that our faith is indeed justified.

On their own, these actions won’t mean much. Trust can still be broken. People can still get burned.

But as more and more of us follow these principles, those risks will diminish. We will bolster our faith in each other while working together to deliver the goods.

That’s a future we can all get behind. But it starts with our actions today.

So, let’s get started.

Leap of Faith

I stood on the platform and took in the view.

To my left and right were palm trees and buildings, illuminated in the steamy morning sunshine.

Below me — some 33 feet below me — was a swimming pool.

I was at the top of the 10 meter dive tower at the University of Miami. And at this moment, I was wondering what I had got myself into.

Wow, I thought. I can see all of campus from here.

Not exactly a reassuring thought, as I prepared to plunge into the water three stories below.

My mind started to race.

What if I overshoot the pool and land on the concrete? What if I injure myself hitting the water? What in the world am I doing?

I thought back to the only time I had seen someone up on the platform who wasn’t on the diving team. It was a girl who won a belly-flop contest the lifeguards set up. She ran off the edge, screaming in terror until she was underwater.

We all laughed insensitively, because that’s what college kids do. But now, the joke was on me.

I looked back at the narrow ladders I had climbed to get here. They looked even more treacherous to descend.

There was only one realistic way down. I knew it. But I wasn’t ready.

I felt a pit in my stomach. The sweat from my anxiety mixed with that from the humidity.

I closed my eyes and opened them. Then I ran off the edge.

The first thing I remember seeing was the water through my peripheral vision.

No, not the peripheral vision that helps us see what’s to our left and right without us turning our heads. The peripheral vision that helps us see what’s above and below us.

We normally don’t think about what we visualize from this vantage point. After all, looking at our shoes gets old pretty quick.

But we’re normally not hurtling 30 feet toward the ground. That changes things.

I was falling, but the water still looked distant. So I started flailing my legs, thinking that would somehow soften the blow.

Suddenly, I remembered the instructions I was given: Run off the edge and make sure you’re straight up when you hit the water.

I stopped moving my legs and let gravity run its course.

As soon I did this, something unexpected happened. I felt a strange sense of calm.

I let gravity do its work. Everything felt Zen.

Well, everything except that rushing sound in my ears. It kept getting louder and louder.

That sound was the air flying by me as I was in freefall. And it was getting louder because I was speeding up.

Suddenly, the water was right below me. I was close — painfully close — to impact.

I made a last ditch effort to straighten my legs. Then, SPLASH.

I hit the water like a ton of bricks. My feet and ankles felt the sting of impact.

After dropping close to 10 feet underwater, I started to ascend back to the surface. Then I slowly swam over to the ladder and climbed onto the deck.

My classmate approached me, holding my digital camera and a few other items I’d temporarily put in her care.

This whole crazy experience was her idea.

She was an NCAA champion diver, and we were in a video production class together. She was at the pool that morning filming a promo for a class project.

She had asked me to tag along to help her carry the video equipment, since some of the clips she was filming were from the 3 meter springboard — about 10 feet above the pool deck. I happily obliged.

“Wear your swim trunks,” she told me the day before the shoot. “That way, you can jump off the 10 Meter when we’re done.”

Now, I had just that. And the adrenaline had yet to wear off.

“Oh, that was something else!” I told my classmate. “Say, which height did you win the NCAA title in, again?”

“The 10 Meter,” she calmly replied.

I stared at her, awestruck.

Diving off the 10 Meter means walking to the edge of that 33 foot high platform and turning around in such a way that your toes are just about the only part of your body still making contact with that platform. It means propelling yourself backwards off the edge, headfirst. It means contorting your body into a set of elaborate twists and rolls as you’re falling. And it means entering the water with pinpoint precision.

It takes a leap of faith just to do this once. As NCAA champion, my classmate had done this hundreds of times — often in the heat of intense competition. And she executed it to precision when it mattered most.

This was no fluke. Three years after my leap of the 10 Meter, my classmate was in London, representing the United States in diving at the Olympic games. There’s no doubt that she’s the best athlete I’ve ever personally met.

Even so, her daily accomplishments from the diving platform put everything in perspective. That acute fear I’d felt moments earlier seemed downright silly now.

I took a deep breath, and resolved not to make such a big deal out of what I’d just done.

In the years since my plunge from the 10 Meter, I’ve had other aquatic adventures.

I’ve jumped off a 10 foot dock into a lake inlet. And off the top of a party barge into the middle of a different lake.

It was fun to take flight. And on scorching Texas summer afternoons, I dare say it was necessary to plunge into cooler waters.

Yet, both times, I failed to feel the exhilaration I did after I jumped off the 10 Meter. The apprehension was gone, but so was the rush of energy.

This was not because of differences in the height I jumped from. It was because of something far more fundamental.

My 10 Meter experience represented the first leap of faith I ever took. Quite literally.

I put myself in a position to do something both novel and uncomfortable. I felt the fear and I did it anyway.

I was better for the experience. I unlocked confidence and courage I didn’t realize I had before.

This confidence and courage came in handy months later, when I moved halfway across the country to a city I had never been to and started working in a field I had little experience in.

It helped me again years later, when I switched careers and moved to another new city without a job lined up.

And it has helped me in countless other, less-dramatic scenarios as well.

Feeling the fear and doing it anyway is a vital part of growing up.

For we will all encounter a new experience in our lives. Whether that starting a job, starting a family or starting to notice changes in our physical abilities. Or maybe even all three.

There’s no reference guide for these experiences. Sure, we can lean on the knowledge of those who’ve encountered these experiences before, but that won’t fully prepare us for what we feel in the moment.

We will feel apprehension —  if not abject terror — as we navigate these experiences firsthand for the first time. This is normal.

Yet, our ability to make it through the changes, and to grow from the experience, only comes if we’re willing to take a leap of faith. To feel the fear and do it anyway.

And that journey has to start somewhere.

Maybe not on the top of a 10 Meter dive tower, as mine did. But somewhere.

So, let us resolve to be bolder. To look out upon that new experience on the horizon that terrifies us and to face it head on.

Let us resolve to take a leap of faith.

Our future depends on it.

Faith and Fate

In recent years, I’ve been quite open about my faith. Faith has both graced my life and helped guide it.

I wouldn’t be the man I am today without my faith. Faith has forged the moral code that serves as a background for my actions, views and decisions. Faith has illuminated the road less traveled I’ve taken through my adult life. Faith has shown me wonder and amazement in the course of my travels and travails, and brought purpose to the otherwise robotic and mundane routine called everyday life.

But faith has not driven my life. Fate has.

It’s easy to misappropriate these terms. Culturally, faith is generally associated with good fortune, while fate is considered a dark and dubious term. One is tied with meaning, the other placed in lockstep with the cruelties of randomization.

But it’s not just simplistic and shortsighted to make these generalizations; it’s also plain wrong.

In truth, fate encompasses what happens to us in life. Faith encompasses how we respond to it.

***

On the day after Christmas, devastating tornadoes tore through the eastern suburbs of Dallas. Within moments, 11 people were dead, dozens others were hurt, and hundreds of houses were gone. In the wake of this heartbreaking devastation, someone undoubtedly thought, “How could God do this?”

But God didn’t do this.

The weather conditions were ripe for tornado development, and, lo and behold, a tornado exploded across a busy interstate and nearby residential neighborhood. It was fate that led to the devastation — people, houses and pets being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That doesn’t make it any easier for us to swallow. So we look for the meaning, and, finding none, blame God and turn away from Him.

***

Devastating episodes like this illustrate the gulf we’ve built between faith and fate, as exposure to one serves to drive away the other. We believe that faith can help us repel wickedness, and by extension, cruel twists of fate. But when the darkest sides of fate turn our lives upside down, we repel faith.

But these two concepts are actually symbiotic.

Our faith anchors us in morality and serves as our compass. But without fate, we have nothing concrete to build off of.

Fate can knock us to the canvas without rhyme or reason, But faith allows us to rally behind our morality.

When we use the two together, we can live stronger, richer lives — even in the wake of events that rock our world.

***

If fate is what happens to us, and faith is how we respond, we must re-examine our cultural definition of meaning. We tend to attach this concept to actions, when we really should tie it to reactions.

This conceptual shift helps us view the world more accurately. It also forces us to face our fears, manifested in one sobering statement.

We can’t control what happens to us.

Scary, but true. We all want control over our lives and the events therein, but the forces of fate are stronger than our desires. What we can control is our response to the highs and lows fate throws our way. And we can use the meaning we draw from these reactions to strengthen and enrich our lives.

***

I believe all of this this, because I’ve lived it.

When I was a teenager, I had no idea my adult life would take the path it has. Fate hit me hard at times — at one point, I found myself lonely and frightened in a remote West Texas city; at another, I found myself living in a hotel room for three months as I looked for a marketing job — but faith was always there to guide me.

Faith helped me focus not on the actions fate had thrown at me, but what my reaction would be. In particular, faith helped keep me even-keeled, motivated and morally sound, even in the wake of hardships and setbacks. I subsequently drew value and meaning from my reactions to these experiences; as a result, I’m a stronger, wiser man today.

Don’t run from faith, or try and give fate the slip. Welcome both with open arms.