Article

Character

Creed

Sport

6 August 2024

6 min read

Letter to the Olympians

A veteran sports chaplain writes a letter to Christian Olympians, on how they can find joy amid the 'funerals and weddings' of the games.

Ashley Null

Ashley Null serves as a chaplain to elite athletes and coaches. He is also a priest and an academic.

A swimmer at the end of a race, looks to the result screen.

Adam Peaty after an Olympic race.

BBC.

Dear Friend,

Congratulations on being selected to compete in the Olympics - the greatest games in the world! I’m sure you can’t wait to get out there and show the world what you’ve got - your amazing talent and skill and all the hard work and dedication that has gone into becoming an Olympian.

Now, it has been said that being at the Olympics is like experiencing 10 funerals for every 1 wedding. You know this if you’re in elite sport - every one person’s victory is at the expense of many others’ agony of defeat.

These next few weeks will be full of the strongest emotions and potential challenges to how you think about your faith. What does it look like to integrate your faith and your sport in the midst of such pressure?

First, God has called you to the Olympics to experience true joy.

The first reason God gave the good gift of sport is for it to bring joy.

“In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun. It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, like a champion rejoicing to run his course,” writes the Psalmist.

God compares our sport to a honeymoon - both physically and emotionally satisfying - what high praise for the joy of sport!

Every race, every match, every competition, is an opportunity to experience this God-given joy.

This joy will help you in the ups and especially in the downs over the next few weeks. The Bible makes this clear again and again, that it is joy that helps us endure the difficulties in life.

These next few weeks, make a conscious effort to count every blessing, thanking God for the joy of sport and the amazing experience he has given you.

As you compete you can witness to many the wonderful joy of sport... By not torturing yourself in defeat with self-loathing and shame, instead rejoicing with those who win and weeping with those who don’t.

Second, but Elite Competition isn’t only about joy. It includes uncertainty, fear, and even loss. God can use all aspects of sport, both the highs and the lows, to draw you closer to Himself.

The second reason God give gifts to his people is to use them as a school of discipleship.

St Paul writing to Christians in Ephesus said: “So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ."

God has given you this vocation as a ‘school of discipleship’ to learn what it looks like to love God and love others.

As you compete and lean on the promises of God, you have endless opportunities to grow in living out your faith.

To remember your identity is based on the cross and not your success and failures
To remember the power you have to compete does not come from your own strength but from Christ who is at work in you
To remember your standing before God does not change because of God’s grace, whether you win or lose, fail or succeed
To remember that if you do lose, God will be there with you and use your pain, but that the pain will not have the last word in your life - God will work all things for good

Third, you can serve others as you compete.

As you compete you can witness to many the wonderful joy of sport:

By competing drug-free and within the rules you can show an alternative to the winner-takes-all attitude so prevalent in all sport.
By not treating your opponent as the enemy but valuing them as a ‘co-worker’ you can push each other on to excellence.
By showing humility and thankfulness in victory, recognising that other Christian athletes have worked just as hard and prayed just as much, but that God has set aside gifts other than Olympic success for them.
By not torturing yourself in defeat with self-loathing and shame, instead rejoicing with those who win and weeping with those who don’t.

In all this you can show the wonderful, transforming news of the gospel at work in your life as you experience joy in the midst of the funerals and weddings seen at the Olympic Games.

But what if things don’t work out as you hoped? God will be there for you and with you in the midst of the pain. As you grieve, look for Jesus.

He will give you the comfort you long for.

He will remind you that his love for you is stronger and will last much longer than your present pain.
He will assure you that he still has good things for you.

Ask his help to hold on to this truth. Because when you are hurting, it is so easy to listen to lies. You see, it’s a real danger to view God as your ultimate coach.

The lie says that if you make good spiritual choices then you will be on God’s winning team and blessed with success. But when success doesn’t happen, the lie says it’s because you have made bad choices and don’t deserve to be on the team, at least not until you can prove yourself spiritually good enough again.

In all of your sporting career you’ve probably been taught to only feel good about yourself when you’re winning, that if you lose, you’re nothing. Your coaches may have told you to use the shame of losing to motivate you to success.

Friend, you need to separate your sense of worth, your identity, from your performance. Equating significance and achievement will always leave your self-esteem at the mercy of the natural ups and downs of being a top-level sportsperson. But only love has the power to make humans feel significant, performance never will.

The good news of the gospel is that in God, you have unconditional love, not based on any of your performance. You are valued and loved not because of the talents you have or the way you compete. Your worth and value is seen in the love God proved he had for you when he died for you on the cross.

St Paul tells us:

“God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Now, as people reconciled to God there is no condemnation, nothing can separate us from God’s love and we are adopted as God’s children - this is who you are. This is where you identity alone can be found. This is where you can find peace, even in the midst of a major loss.

Friends, enjoy these next few weeks and the amazing opportunity it is. If you feel the pain of loss, know that with Jesus pain never has the last word. His love always does. If you win, know that it is a wonderful gift of God to be thankful for, and he will make good use of it, long after you have retired, giving you decades of joy.

Solo Deo Gloria!

Adapted by Jonny Reid, for Christians in Sport, from Pastoral Care in the Olympic Village by Ashley Null in Sports Chaplaincy: Trends, Issues and Debates.

Column

Awe and wonder

Creed

Film & TV

Re-enchanting

4 March 2025

4 min read

The great pie mystery

Some unusual graffiti give insight into reality’s mysteries.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A green bridge spans a motorway, on its side is graffiti that reads 'PIES'

The view on the M6.

drgillybean, Creative Commons.

Do you have a favourite piece of graffiti? I used to.

If you're travelling on the M6 around Cheshire, at some point you’ll come to one of those green motorway bridges. And on the side of it, overlooking the tarmac, you'll see in massive writing the word “PIES”.

When I was a kid, I used to be fascinated by this. It raises so many questions. Who wrote the graffiti? How did they do it? Was this person in favour of pies or against them? Was it about all pies or just some pies? What had happened in this person's life to make them have such strong opinions about pastry?

And it was just me. For nearly 30 years, people were left nonplussed about the graffiti as more and more instances of it began to crop up across the North-West of England.

And then, in 2016, the mystery was solved. Apparently, it wasn't really to do with pies at all. It was all the result of a Liverpool band called The Pies trying to promote their music. After getting stuck on the motorway one day, they decided to write the name of their band on the side of the motorway bridge because, well, what else are you going to do when you’re broken down?

It's fair to say, I was a little bit gutted to learn about the origins of the graffiti.

What was once an intriguing mystery that kept me up at night and haunted my every thought (okay, perhaps a slight exaggeration) was revealed to be something so … boring. With hindsight, I wish I'd never learnt the truth about what happened. I thought wanted to know the origins of the pastry-based vandalism but, as they say, ignorance sometimes is bliss.

You see, we sometimes need a little bit of mystery in life.

Peel back the world in Lost or Westworld and you see there’s actually only a thin layer of reality masking a great chasm of nothingness.

This is evident in lots of different ways, but perhaps most apparent when it comes to entertainment and art. TV series Lost, for example, was a huge hit when it first came out. Why did the plane crash? What is the island? What is the smoke monster? Viewers were hooked and demanded answers.

But then answers came and everyone was upset. As Lost went through series after series, and explained more and more about what was happening, the audience slowly became more and more disenchanted with the program. The finale – where the programme’s biggest mysteries were finally revealed – was almost universally panned.

The same to be said of the recent HBO hit Westworld. Its first series was by far and away its best. But season two and three trailed off significantly as there was simply no mystery left in the programme after its spectacular first series. I wonder if this is precisely why the works of the late David Lynch were as compelling as they were? The still-incredible Twin Peaks holds up so well precisely because it categorically refuses to explain itself.

Elsewhere there is a growing tendency in video games, for example, for the narrative of the story to be hidden away, shrouded in mystery and atmosphere. Think of From Software games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring, massively successful in part because they are so mysterious. In both instances, it’s entirely possible to complete the game and have no clue whatsoever that there was even a story in the game, let alone to understand it. The player becomes captured by the mysteries of the worlds they find themselves in, and it’s these mysteries, rather than any answers, than compel them forwards.

The reason why programmes like Lost and Westworld begin to lose their allure as they explain more and more about their world is that this jars with the reality of the world around us. Peel back the world in Lost or Westworld and you see there’s actually only a thin layer of reality masking a great chasm of nothingness.

Peel back the world around us, however, and reality goes all the way down. And this is precisely what we would expect from a world created by a God, who is infinitely Infinite. Reality is not paper thin; goes all the way down. It is mysterious, unfathomable, and resists easy answers.

And so, when we get disappointing explanations about a plane crash in a TV programme, or the origins of our favourite graffiti, it rightly leaves us feeling unsatisfied. Because we are made to be at home in a world that is deeply real. We are made to be at home in a world where the reality has unfathomable, unimaginable depth to it. A world that cannot simply be explained away.

And this is why mystery is so important in our life. In the post-Enlightenment culture in which we find ourselves, a culture that demands every question be answered and every Scooby-Doo villain be unmasked, the notion of boundless mystery might seem somewhat disquieting.

But we are made for mystery. And this is why the best works of art trade more on the mysteries they introduce, rather than the answers that might be behind them. And this is why mystery can be found all around us. Even in a pie.

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