Me and my daughter in law, Missy, at the game.

In March we went to the South Region Elite 8 NCAA Basketball Tournament.  We went because our youngest son and his wife both graduated from Baylor University and Baylor was playing in the tournament.  Baylor’s basketball program has had its struggles and yet, our son remained a loyal and true fan.  He cheered for them when he was living in Peru, he cheered for them from New York and now from Pennsylvania. But on this weekend, there he was.  A Baylor Bear fan at one of the biggest events in college basketball and he couldn’t have been more excited.  We wore Baylor shirts in support of his team and while we cheered loudly for the green and gold, we certainly could not match his fervor. 

I couldn’t help but notice that while there were lots of true blue Duke fans in the crowd on Sunday afternoon when Baylor and Duke played for the right to travel to the final four there was also a significant number of people who had no particular allegiance to Duke, but they were there wearing a Blue Devil t-shirt.  Perhaps they liked associating with a front-runner or maybe they just wanted to express their admiration for the great basketball tradition at Duke.  Surely they were basketball fans, but they were certainly not the passionate, stand on your chair and yell kind of Duke fans. 

At times in my faith walk I realize that I am going through the motions, sort of just wearing the t-shirt… Yes, I identify myself as a Christian…but how devoted am I as a follower of Christ?  Sometimes I don’t like the answer to that question.  In my walk toward becoming more genuine I have discovered that a genuine love requires devotion, sacrifice and great care.  My prayer is that I become ever more genuine in my love for Christ.  I also pray that I will never again just wear the t-shirt.

Several years ago I gave up making New Year’s Resolutions.  Instead I decided to take a few days to pray and really ask the Lord to give me a word or a phrase to guide me through the coming year.  During the course of the three days I read only the Bible.   The first year of this experiment produced a deep change in my life.

The word that stayed in my mind was “wholeheartedly”.  I started to look at everything in my life through this one word.  Let your yes be yes and your no be no.  Commit wholeheartedly.   There were a number of things in my life that I was pursuing half-heartedly.  I decided there were some things I needed to say No to.  There were some I needed to say Yes to. I became very intentional in my commitments.  This was so much more powerful than goal setting or reordering priorities.

I realized I was never very good at saying no.  I said yes to too many things and I would spiral into a cycle of overwhelm, a less than best result, and then hiding from my imperfection.  There were many areas of my life that could have been filed in the category of unfinished.  Even the limitations of physical illness felt like failure to me and I stayed in deep denial of the symptoms that were progressing at an alarming rate.  I would hide from it all…within myself, avoiding the feeling of falling short, closing my eyes to unfinished tasks and abandoned promises.  Many of my abandoned promises were ones I had made to myself.

This one word helped me put my feet back on the path.  I was now on a path to a much higher level of personal integrity and one step closer to being genuine.

What I found was that by saying No I was free to really say Yes… Wholeheartedly.