WHEN WINNING IS LOSING

Taken from Bob Lupton’s Theirs is the Kingdom

I’ve always been competitive. Growing up I used enormous amounts of energy trying to beat my older brother at arm wrestling, chess, arguments, and anything else I thought I had a chance of winning. My competitiveness during these developmental years prepared me well for the business world I entered as an adult. The name of the game was winning, and I thrived on it.

My competitiveness reached its peak one day in my twenty-sixth year. I was flying door-gunner on a helicopter in Vietnam, and we were on a search-and destroy- mission. Suddenly the ground beneath us came alive with enemy fire. The intense battle that followed demanded the ultimate in combat strategy, skill, and commitment. The stakes were never higher and victory was never more exhilarating. I accepted with pride a medal for heroism in aerial combat.

It was only later, while still in Vietnam, that I began to understand the implications of my competitiveness, as I flew back from another “successful” mission, I realized that the emotions I experienced were the same I once felt while wrestling or debating. They were more intense because the stakes were higher, but they were unmistakably the same emotions. I was taking human life and feeling the thrill of victory. This thrill was inversely proportional to the agony of defeat—in this case death and maiming.

I began to suspect there was something wrong with a system in which my winning was building upon the defeat of another human being. When I returned to the United States I was unable to put this new insight behind me. I began working with disadvantaged people who were losers in a competitive economy. I saw young men, broken men, crippled by too many years of defeat. They could not find the inner strength to try competing again for jobs in the marketplace. I saw their children compete for education and job training, and weaken in the heat of the struggle because their bodies were poorly nourished and their spirits short on dreams.  And although I felt unpatriotic for thinking such thoughts, I wondered if all was well with an economic system where winning meant defeating another human being. Could it be that among human beings cooperation was a better way than competition?

I pray that one day God will bring in a new order in which human beings will rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. Perhaps on that day we will refuse the gains made at the expense of others and our success will be measured by the quality of our servanthood to humanity.