All my memories of High School gym class are painful memories so I have tried to blot them out.  This one persists despite my efforts to forget.  We were playing basketball, a sport in which my distaste for the game and my lack of talent are in perfect correlation.  It was gym class.  Playing was compulsory.  So, I kept my head down and tried to avoid causing excessive damage to my team through my lack of athleticism. 

Assuming a standard bell-curve distribution of basketball talent, I would have been at the left end of the curve.  Way out on the right end of the curve was one of my classmates whose frustration was matched only by his competitiveness.  Despite my presence, the team was probably not much worse than the average randomly assigned team in the gym class, but this was not good enough for our talented and competitive captain.  Eventually he blurted out what he had, no doubt, been thinking throughout the game: “I can’t do this all by myself!”

Nope, he couldn’t.  But he had been making the mistake of trying to do it all by himself anyway.

He had assessed the talent and motivation of the team and (correctly) determined that he was at the top of both the talent and motivation scoreboards.  He was not suffering from poor judgement or an inflated ego.  He was the best of us.  He cared the most.

But he wasn’t enough by himself.

Granted, he would have been foolish to pass the ball to me, but the other guys on the team were good enough to utilize more than he did.  By taking the burden on himself alone, he guaranteed not only that the other team would win but that he would be more frustrated and resentful.

Whenever I read Psalm 12:1, I think of my frustrated classmate: “Help me, LORD, for there is no godly one left; the faithful have vanished from among us.”

Often when we care deeply about something and commit ourselves fully to it, we can imagine that no one else matches our level of passion.  Maybe.  But that doesn’t mean that no one else cares at all.

The prophet Elijah thought he was the last person standing faithfully before God and he felt resentful of all the slackers who had succumbed to idolatry.  What he didn’t know was that there were 5000 others just like him who had stayed true to the God of Israel.

Sometimes you feel like the only one who cares.  This is almost never true.  And even if you are surrounded by the half-hearted and indifferent, complaining about the burden you’re carrying is hardly likely to inspire them.

Instead, pass them the ball and hope for the best.

Prayer:  Lord, remind us that we are in this together.  Let enthusiasm and hope be contagious among us because none of us can do it alone.  Amen.