The Highlight Reel
I was sitting at the gym yesterday thinking about all the things in my life that are not going right. The list felt long, and as I moved from one thought to the next, I found myself doing what I often do when things feel uncertain: searching for meaning. I thought about prayer and the way I sometimes struggle with what to say. I thought about manifestation and the idea that our words matter, that the stories we tell ourselves shape the way we experience our lives. I wondered whether I have been focusing too much on what is missing, whether I have spent too much time looking at the things that have gone wrong instead of the things that continue to go right. It is easy, especially during difficult seasons, to begin examining every thought and every decision, looking for the moment where you may have somehow stepped off course.
As I sat there, every television in the gym seemed to be showing a different sport. There was baseball on one screen, hockey on another, Formula One racing, basketball, NASCAR. I wasn't paying much attention at first, but eventually I started noticing what was actually being shown. None of the clips were moments of perfection. The Formula One replay showed a driver missing a corner by the smallest of margins. A baseball player failed to make a catch in the outfield. Hockey players were shoving each other after a play had gone sideways. Everywhere I looked, the highlights being replayed were moments where something had gone wrong.
For whatever reason, I couldn't stop thinking about it.
When I look at my own life, I often treat mistakes, disappointments, and setbacks as evidence. Evidence that I made the wrong decision. Evidence that I missed something important. Evidence that I am somehow not where I am supposed to be. Yet when I watch other people, especially people pursuing something difficult, I don't think that way at all. I don't see a race car driver miss a corner and conclude he should stop racing. I don't watch an athlete drop a ball and assume he is playing the wrong sport. I understand instinctively that mistakes are part of the process, that failure is woven into the fabric of every worthwhile pursuit. For some reason, extending that same understanding to myself has always been more difficult.
Lately, I have found myself wondering whether all of the challenges in my life are trying to tell me something. Whether they are signs that I am not on the right path. Whether I have somehow wandered away from where I am supposed to be. But sitting there today, watching those screens, I found myself considering a different possibility. What if difficult seasons are not proof that we are lost? What if they are simply part of the journey itself? What if disappointment, uncertainty, heartbreak, and struggle are not interruptions to the story, but chapters within it?
I have always wanted to believe that things happen for a reason, although I am not sure I mean that in the simple way the phrase is often used. I don't think every painful experience arrives neatly packaged with a lesson attached. I don't think suffering is inherently meaningful. But I do know that many of the experiences that once felt impossible to understand eventually became significant in ways I could not have anticipated at the time. Looking back, I can see how certain losses changed me, how certain disappointments redirected me, and how some of the things I fought hardest against ultimately shaped the person I became. The meaning was never visible while I was living through it. It only appeared with distance.
Perhaps that is what faith really is. Not believing that everything will happen exactly as we hope, nor believing that saying the right words will somehow guarantee the right outcome. Perhaps faith is accepting that we do not have access to the full picture while we are standing inside of it. It is trusting that understanding does not always arrive on our timeline and that clarity often comes long after certainty has disappeared. It is believing that a difficult chapter does not necessarily mean we are in the wrong story.
The truth is that I still do not know why certain things have happened the way they have. I still do not know why some doors remain closed while others seem unwilling to open. I still do not know what this season is preparing me for, or whether it is preparing me for anything at all. What I do know is that the athletes on those screens were not defined by the moments being replayed. Their stories were larger than a missed catch, a missed corner, or a single bad decision. Those moments may have been worthy of a highlight reel, but they were not the whole story.
Perhaps the same is true of us. Perhaps the moments we replay endlessly in our own minds are not nearly as significant as we imagine them to be. Perhaps what feels like failure is simply one frame in a much larger picture. Perhaps what feels like being lost is actually the uncomfortable space between where we have been and where we are going. And perhaps the work is not figuring everything out immediately, but continuing forward without demanding answers before their time. Patience.
Sitting there at the gym today, surrounded by televisions and replayed mistakes, I felt something I have not felt in a while. Not certainty. Not resolution. Just the quiet possibility that I may not be as far off course as I sometimes fear. For now, that feels like enough.