The Men We Need by Brant Hansen

Author:Brant Hansen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christian Living / Men;Christian men—Religious life;Christian men—Conduct of life;Men (Christian theology);REL012060;REL012070;REL012120
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2022-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

Allow Yourself to “Lose”

While ambition is a very good thing, don’t confuse it with winning. Many people do.

If I’m ambitious, I must win at my career. I must win the deal. I must win the game. I want to be a winner.

That’s ambition, right?

I highly recommend being ambitious about losing. And if I may brag for a moment, I might be the Global Champion of Losing. Some people lose, sure, but I take it to the next level.

I lost a checkers game to a Boy Scout in Kenya. He was surrounded by throngs of friends cheering him on. I got distracted and left myself open (not on purpose) for a game-deciding double-king jump. The crowd went wild and stormed the table. It all got blurry from there, but I think they carried the boy out on their shoulders.

When in Indonesia following the tsunami, our small team of rescue workers camped on the ground near where a group of survivors from a fishing village had taken refuge in tents with their few possessions. One of them had saved his chess set. After they learned to trust us, we had a match for the ages: Muslim Man from Indonesia vs. Strange White Christian Nerd from America. We gambled. I bet my rubber boots that I would win. Again, big crowd. Big pressure. I got smoked. This was not on purpose either. He now owns my boots.

I don’t confine my losing to board games either. I’m pretty good at jumping rope, but I lost my first ever jump rope–off to a cocky, pigtailed, “Ooh-aren’t-I-great” eight-year-old named Stacey. Again, she had home-field advantage in Ethiopia. I could have done without the crowd chanting, “Sta-cey, Sta-cey . . .”

I started my Global Sports Futility Tour program years ago, when I was hit in the face by a soccer ball traveling at approximately 134 miles per hour. I still remember the Mexican sun framing the silhouette of the six-year-old offender looking down at me as I lay in the dust.

I got a chance to take my baseball skills with me to Kolkata, India, where some middle school kids let me pitch in their sandlot cricket game. I watched their windup style and imitated it exactly. Or maybe I didn’t, because everyone was laughing riotously every time I pitched. They couldn’t stop laughing. Every pitch of mine was apparently the funniest thing they’d ever seen. I was, and remain, perplexed. I still don’t know what I was doing wrong.

I joined a game of soccer on a street in a village in Senegal. It was all adults. It was a friendly pickup game, and they were delighted to have a stranger from America join them. That is, until I repeatedly got smoked on defense, yielding goal after goal. My team soon became icy toward me. The other team smiled at me and made me feel most welcome, which is a testament to their hospitality.

I’ve even been beaten at Connect Four by kids in the CURE hospital in Zambia. But that was deliberate.

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