Remember.

"The LORD has done great things for us,
and we are filled with joy."
- Psalm 126:3

I don't know what we remember. When we are going through a day, it becomes so easy to focus only on what needs to get done, that we forget about why we are doing things. And when we lose perspective on the why, then everything seems to be pointless.

Let me use a tennis example. Right now we work a lot on crosscourt groundstrokes and down-the-line groundstrokes. Sometimes we do this and we "go for more." The purpose is to eventually increase the pace of our attacking shots, and their consistency. But right now we make a lot of errors. If we lose the long-term view, the belief that our shots will get better, and focus just on the fact that we are making errors, we get frustrated easily. One part of remembering is trying to remember the purpose. Why are we working on this? Am I still focused on the right things?

I hope that one of the purposes for all of us is to continue to become like Christ. Many of our tennis experiences can then help us learn how to be like Christ in life's difficult and changing situations. But we have to remember that this call is one of our purposes.

I have seen this happening in different places this season already. Early in August, a player was struggling with feeling confident, feeling like they had energy, feeling like they could move their feet, and consequently, feeling like they could win. They were struggling with all of that and my advice was simple. Act like you are confident, act like you have energy, act like you can move your feet, act like you are going to win. Most of the time, actions guide our feelings in tennis. If you do something even when you don't feel like it, the feeling comes later.

And that's so true in our walk with Christ. I remember that my parent's used to force me to come to church. My dad always said that we would never skip a Sunday or Wednesday. I had to get out of sports practices to make it to youth group, miss Sunday baseball tournaments, etc. And I never felt like going to church. Then I got to college, and I didn't have to go. But a strange thing happened as I slept in that first Sunday morning of college: I felt like I wanted to go to church. The repeated action of going made me feel different about the experience. Now I love my church, and I am actually glad my parents forced me to go.

The point is that tennis can teach us lessons about being like Christ. One lesson that we can remember is that our actions guide our feelings. We need to act first, feel like it later. This has been something learned this season, and it helps us toward a purpose of being like Christ. Let's remember this.