David Leventhal

In late-May Caroline finished her very first season of organized sports.  She was a proud member of the Mighty Tigers T-ball team & she had a blast!  For a couple of years she’s watched, supported and cheered on Daniel as he’s engaged in soccer & t-ball.  She’s looked at the his trophies, proudly displayed in his room  & dreamed of the day when she would have her very own trophy…her own reward for a season of hard work.

With the craziness that has been our lives these last four months she was never able to get her hands on her trophy…her first trophy.  Since her season ended in late-May she’s reminded us on several occasions about the fact that she never got her trophy.  She’s actually been very patient but also persistent in making known her desire to get her trophy.   She has been looking forward to getting her hands on her trophy.

Well, last week we finally got her trophy.  She was thrilled…totally and utterly thrilled to finally be holding this object that represented her hard work.  And she was heart-broken when, within three hours, she’d dropped the object of her affection and in horror watched it shatter into several pieces.

I was out of town when this occurred and when Missy shared with me of the trophy tragedy my heart just sank.  There was just this huge ache in my soul for the sense of loss that my sweet four year old was experiencing.  My first response was to swoop in and buy her a new trophy – to replace the shattered trophy that represented utter sorrow to my daughter.  But my insightful wife in yet another one of her displays of parental wisdom rebuffed me.  She said “No, we won’t buy her a new trophy.  This will be a tough but important lesson on why we don’t place our hopes in golden trophies.”   When all I could see was the immediate sorrow in my daughter’s heart Missy saw a way to redeem this situation for good – she saw the spiritual lesson.

And Missy was right – it was an important lesson for my darling Caroline.  A lesson I’d rather her start learning at age 4 rather than age 14.  But you know what?  It wasn’t just for Caroline – it struck pretty deep into my heart as well.  See it’s real easy for me to look at her 5” plastic trophy and know that one day it’s going to end up in a box in the garage.  The unending joy that Caroline imagined her little trophy would bring will have long since ended.

But it’s much more difficult for me to get my arms around the fact that the very same reality awaits me when I seek my happiness, my fulfillment, and my contentment into something that the Lord views as a 5” plastic trophy.  I’ve heard it said that this world is rigged – that God has built into our universe a law, like gravity, that simply will not allow us to find lasting joy, contentment and satisfaction in the trophies we accumulate for ourselves.  Sure…if I’m honest, there is a rush when I get the new gadget, the new book, the new car, the new whatever.  But you know what?  That rush always fades away…sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly but it always dissipates leaving me craving for the “next big thing.”  I think it’s because we were built for so much more than plastic trophies. C.S. Lewis captured this idea in his classic book Mere Christianity.  He writes:

“God made us; invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it could not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were assigned to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion.  God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”

So my prayer for Caroline…my prayer for myself is that we would enjoy God’s gifts to us (& they are plentiful), that we would hold loosely to them keeping them in their proper place and that we would be consumed with Christ – the One that our hearts truly long for…the One that brings lasting joy, lasting contentment and lasting peace.