On a chilly January night, the Jacksonville Jaguars and Los Angeles Chargers took the field in North Florida.
It was a National Football League playoff showdown, featuring two compelling teams led by rising stars.
A great game was in store. Or was it?
The game got off to an inauspicious start. Jacksonville quarterback Trevor Lawrence threw an interception on the second play of the game.
The misfire put Los Angeles in prime position to score. The Chargers put a touchdown on the board less than a minute later.
This was hardly the start Jaguars fans were expecting. But they surely didn’t expect what was still to come.
On Jacksonville’s next possession, Lawrence threw another interception. The Chargers took advantage of the blunder, scoring again.
Lawrence went on to throw a third interception later in the first quarter, and fourth in the second quarter.
By the time halftime arrived, the Chargers led the Jaguars by a score of 27 to 7. Lawrence was directly responsible for 17 points of that 20-point deficit.
It looked like the Jacksonville’s season was about to end with a thud. But another plot twist was in the offing.
The Jaguars came onto the field with renewed purpose in the second half. And slowly but surely, Jacksonville started chipping away at the deficit.
Lawrence stopped turning the ball over, tossing touchdown passes instead on three straight drives. And the Jaguars defense held the Los Angeles offense to three points, bending but never breaking.
With just a few minutes left, Lawrence found the ball in his hands one more time. His team trailed by two points.
Lawrence confidently led the Jacksonville offense down the field, putting them in position to kick a field goal.
The kicker drilled the attempt through the uprights with no time left on the clock. The Jaguars, improbably, won the game by a score of 31 to 30.
Their season was still alive.
In the days after this playoff football game, two narratives percolated through the media.
One claimed that the Los Angeles Chargers had choked. On the precipice of a road playoff win, they got complacent. And in doing so, they fell apart.
It was a compelling argument. Teams rarely waste 20-point halftime advantages in the NFL playoffs. Doing so requires them to squander countless opportunities, to be the architects of their own demise.
The label is sure to stick.
Even so, the more prevalent narrative from this game was that of Trevor Lawrence’s redemption. Pundits marveled at how the Jaguars signal-caller faced down adversity and led his team to a scintillating victory.
It was the stuff of Hollywood legend, it would seem. Except that it wasn’t.
You see, Lawrence hadn’t overcome adversity. He’d simply cleaned up his own mess.
His bone-headed decisions and poor throws had put Jacksonville on the brink of playoff elimination. As the leader of the team, it was his obligation to atone for his poor play.
Lawrence ultimately did that. But his second half performance was hardly the stuff of redemption.
Redemption, you see, has a distinct definition. It’s the process of getting back up when you’ve been knocked down. Of rising to the mountaintop after coming up short.
There’s a certain amount of pain intertwined with this process. There’s the haunting ache from having done your best – of having gotten so close – and finding yourself with nothing to show for it.
That ache serves as fuel to make the previously impossible, possible. That fuel is a key element of redemption. And it demands a baseline of achievement to even find a place in the tank.
What Lawrence did in the first half of that playoff game hardly counts as a baseline of achievement. He’d dug his team a deep hole through impotence, and you could hardly say that he deserved a better outcome than the one emblazoned on the scoreboard.
This was folly epitomized.
And yet, Jacksonville escaped unscathed.
Perhaps Trevor Lawrence wasn’t the only one to exhibit folly.
Yes, from a bird’s eye view, any analysis of his gridiron adventures seems silly.
This was but a game after all. Even with the hundred-million-dollar player salaries and tens of millions of TV viewers, football remains far from existential.
Yet, far from the bright lights of football fields, we’ve taken similar liberties with our pens. We’ve rebranded folly as redemption. And the implications are stark.
For such a reframe kneecaps the principles of accountability and remorse. It dulls our empathy and feeds our ego at the least suitable of times.
Indeed, if we classify our errors as chances for redemption, we fail to recognize their impact. We neglect to consider who our misdeeds hurt, and in what ways.
That collateral damage gets sidelined, deferred, ignored.
We put the humility on the back burner. We decline to make proper amends.
And as we rise from the ashes of our blunders, we recast ourselves as victims. Victims who have overcome strife on the road to achievements.
This is what happens when we tie redemption to folly. And it’s sickening.
I don’t know how we’ve gotten to this depraved reality
Perhaps we’ve internalized too many fairy tales. Perhaps we’ve taken silver linings from too many Steven King novels.
Perhaps it’s something different entirely.
Regardless, we need to open our eyes.
For when we neglect what’s now in favor of what’s next, we exacerbate our missteps. We cause the fissures of our blunders to become faults and fjords. We carry an air of entitlement, rendering ourselves too big to fail.
We lose. And everyone in our orbit suffers.
It would be far better to take our folly at face value. To accept the consequences of our mistakes and marinate in our remorse. To make amends, hat in hand.
Such habits will help foster a sense of compassion within our soul. They’ll steer us away from recklessness. They’ll provide a more sustainable path forward.
And above all that, they’ll keep us from commandeering redemption for our own grandeur. The concept can return to its rightful pedestal until we can raise ourselves up to prove worthy of its mantle.
This is how it should be. And I hope this is the way it will be.
Folly and redemption are oil and water. Let’s stop trying to mix them together.