who’s best?

I sat in awe.  pure awe.  My hands clinched together tightly, my eyes fastened to his fingers.  They were the fastest I’d ever seen in real life, agile, executing each passage with ease and a depth of technique I’d never known.

jaw-dropping amazement.

I was in the eighth grade and I was watching this tenth grade boy play one of the Chopin Polonaises, just after I had competed at the same piano with my own attempt of Chopin’s Military Polonaise.  My pulse was racing and my face felt flush with disappointment as I realized one thing:

My best was not THE best.  Not this year.

In my own personal history there were many more competitions after this one I’ve been recalling today. more recitals, more performances.  many triumphs.  many more losses.  The highs were glorious and the lows were bitter, terribly bitter.    And why?

I can’t pinpoint when it happened, but somewhere along the line I deviated from doing my best and sought to be THE best.   Its a painful road, the road towards idolatry is, I can assure you.  And for me it is the hardest idol to remove from my heart.

Years later, I now find myself in a somewhat “performance” driven position… where I have to acknowledge that I am in a similar predicament.  I don’t want to just do my best – I want to be better than everyone else.  To do my best, in the simplest sense, is to sacrificially give of myself to the One who gave me this gift…  To focus on being the best, places that old idol of self reliance and individual accomplishment ahead of Him.  ugh.  And it wreaks of pride and arrogance, which are sins.

So, I read an interesting quote from Tim Keller, which I’ll paraphrase, but it went something like this:  When you uproot an idol, the best way to keep it from growing back is to plant the seeds of God’s love in its place.  In my case, this is very accurate.

The only way for me to stop trying to be the best, from a human perspective is to realize that I don’t have to be.  God created me, for His glory, exactly the way He wanted to – and to do anything other than my best is to fall short of His plans for me.  To live sacrificially, giving my gifts to Him with a pure heart, that brings Him glory.

To be the best at being me – that is what His will is. He does not love me because of my excellence.  That’s impossible.  He loves me because I am His child and He chooses to love me with a forever love. There’s no earning His affections :  I don’t have to be number one now and I never did.  These are the seeds of love I’m planting today.