10. Don’t glide, but stroke to the finish.

Mike Cavic was gliding to the finish in Friday night’s 100 meter free-style. Just behind him, Michael Phelps was still pumping, stroking. That final half-stroke propelled Phelps forward to touch the electronic pad one-hundredth of a second before Cavic. Along with a billion other viewers, I could see that Cavic had won. We were all knocked out to see Phelps’ name flashed on the screen as the winner. Turns out his mother was surprised, too. The television cameras showed her deflated reaction to what appeared to be a loss, then relief and elation flooding over her as she realized he had won the race and his seventh gold medal.

Stroking made the difference.

Over the past few days, being on vacation allowed me to watch more of the Olympics than would have normally been the case, and I had wondered about this. Why do swimmers go all-out during the race, then glide to the finish? It’s definitely slower than stroking. You know it couldn’t be so, but it appears they decided to give themselves a little break at the end.

I once knew a pastor who served his church faithfully for over a quarter of a century. He was a good man in a hundred ways. But those who worked alongside him said, “He retired five years before he quit.”

He was gliding home.

9. It’s getting harder and harder to tell what’s real.

Turns out that the opening ceremony fireworks, watched by a billion people around the globe by television, was computer enhanced. Officials said they did not want to risk fires by exploding all the fireworks the occasion called for, so they did the next best thing: simulated much of them.

Nearly 30 years ago, I spent a few minutes in the studio of a professional photographer in Grenada, Mississippi, and watched him move the moon around on a photograph to get just the effect he wanted. Once he had it where he liked it, he printed the photo and no one was the wiser. I remember that now and think, “That was a generation ago. No telling what they can do now.”

My wife and I were combing through antique stores in Jackson, Mississippi, some years back and noticed workers hammering away in a back room. “What are they doing?” I asked the owner. “Building antiques,” she said. They were tearing apart ancient pieces of furniture no longer of use to anyone and using the wood to fashion new items which would then be marketed as antique.

The more we are surrounded by the fake, the “virtual,” and the computer-generated, the more need there will be for God’s people to be genuine and demonstrate to the world what the real article looks like.

8. If you want to win, build your team.

The USA basketball team found this out four years ago at Athens. They staffed the team with the best talent the NBA had to offer. Trouble was, they came across as a bunch of prima donnas who stayed in luxury hotels and not in the Olympic Village. They barely took the time to get acquainted with each other. They were beaten handily in the early rounds and did not make it into the finals.

This year, Coach Mike Krzyzewski made sure that would not happen again. In lining up players like LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Jason Kidd, and Chris Paul, Coach K emphasized that things would be different this time around. He asked for a three year commitment, as I understand it, and made occasions for the players to hang out, get to be friends. With lots of practice under their belt, this time Team USA is fielding not a collection of individuals but a team, and the results are paying off.

Pastors do well to work at forging their staff and their church into a team. One of the most important questions to ask about a potential staff member is, “Is he a team player?”

The ultimate team player on TEAM USA is Chris Paul, New Orleans’ contribution to this Olympic group. Chris is said to be the most unselfish player ever, eager to get the ball to anyone with a good chance of scoring. What was it President Reagan used to say? “There is no limit to what can be done if no one cares who gets the credit.”

Scripture does not use the “team” metaphor, but one just as powerful, the body. “We being many are one body in Christ, and every one members of one another.” (Romans 12:5)

7. How we treat others matters.

After Swedish wrestler Ara Abrahamian lost his bout with Italian Andrea Minguzzi, he ended up receiving only a bronze medal. The Swede was so upset he stormed out and slammed a door which reverberated throughout the auditorium. At the awards ceremony, as soon as the medal was placed around his neck, he lifted it off and dropped it to the floor. The IOC committee decided he should leave it there, and stripped him of the award.

The IOC explained that Abrahamian violated two Olympic rules, the one forbidding demonstrations of any kind and the one demanding respect for all athletes.

A news report on this incident mentioned a similar incident in a past Olympics in which a Russian athlete was forever barred from international competition for such unsportsmanlike behavior.

Wonder what would happen in major league baseball–and other professional sports in this country–if we held our players to such standards.

Somewhere–on youtube or something–I saw a video of a baseball game being played by teenage boys. When the pitcher and the catcher did not like the calls they were getting from the umpire, they decided to get revenge. The pitcher threw the ball as he normally would, but the catcher acted as though he had misread the pitch and missed it altogether. The ball hit the umpire and hurt him. Good trick, right? The authority governing that game did not think so, and fined the two players. Then, in a satisfying display of high standards, the college which had offered the catcher a baseball scholarship informed him they were canceling it. They did not want players of such low caliber representing their school.

Some time ago, I reported here an incident that took place at our New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary when a professor failed a student in a preaching class for the rude behavior he had observed from the student while driving his car on a local street.

6. Make your words sweet; you may have to eat them.

Jenn Stuczynski of Churchville, New York, is ranked as the number 2 pole vaulter in the world, behind a Russian woman. In Beijing, she told an ESPN reporter that she wants to make good on her vow to “go out and kick some Russian butt.”

I cringed when I read that. Doesn’t she know that opponents feed off just such inflammatory statements.

When a French swimmer indicated that his team would “smash” the USA relay team, Michael Phelps and his colleagues used that to fire themselves up and won the gold.

Football teams scour newspapers for just such foolish boasts from their upcoming opponents to post in the locker room and motivate their players. That’s why wise coaches constantly admonish their players against saying anything to inspire and fire up the enemy.

There’s a wonderful little line in the Old Testament that fits here. When the king of Syria boasted of all he was going to do in his upcoming battle against the people of God, Israel’s king answered, “Let not him who puts on his armor boast like him who takes it off.” (I Kings 20:11)

5. You must play by the rules–and ignorance is no excuse!

In Olympics baseball, if a game is tied after nine innings, what happens next is nothing like we know it in the States where the game was invented. Thereafter, each half inning opens with runners on first and second. If the score is still tied in the 11th inning and beyond, coaches may bat their players in any order they please. Bizarre? Some of the USA players think so, but some like it this way.

That’s how it’s done in the Olympics and you make the adjustments if you want to compete.

Politicians running for president of this country either love the electoral college system or they hate it. I figure Al Gore hates it. He won the popular vote in 2000, but lost in the electoral college, thanks to Florida (and some would say, the Supreme Court). But that’s how the game is played, according to the U.S.Constitution.

In football, the clock is all important. In baseball, there is no clock and a game can last indefinitely.

A lot of people will be surprised when they stand before God to discover that the game they were playing is not the one that mattered, that they invested all their time and energies in pursuits that came to nothing. “What does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his own soul?” (Matthew 16:26)

4. One person’s foolishness is another’s passion.

I was surprised to see badminton is an Olympic sport. Golf isn’t. Or bowling. Frisbee isn’t either. Trampoline is. American football is not on the list, and neither is ballroom dancing. We hear that this is the last Olympics for women’s softball to be a featured sport, for reasons not clear to me. Why some sports make the hallowed list and others do not is an enigma.

How about cheerleading? Should it be an Olympic sport? You’d be surprised how many people think so.

Look around your house and find the most useless object on the place. Now, I’m hereby announcing to you that somewhere, someone is collecting that item and others like it. Cereal boxes, newspaper inserts, junk mail, brands of toilet tissue, you name it–someone is cluttering his house or garage with his collection.

Why? What drives people to devote their lives to such trivial pursuits? The ultimate answer to that will have to be left to the psychologists, but my take on it is simply that people come into the world with an inner need to do something that gives their lives more meaning. For one person, it’s kicking a football or hitting a ball with a paddle or tossing a ball through a hoop. Not a skill with any practical use to be sure, but do it well enough and someone somewhere will pay you huge amounts of cash to do it for their team.

Crazy world, huh? And the craziest aspect of it is that people get so confused as to what matters and what doesn’t that they sometimes attack those doing really positive, helpful activities and accuse them of wasting their lives.

In 1939, Baker James and Eloise Cauthen resigned the Baptist church they had been pastoring in Fort Worth, Texas, to become missionaries to China. Friends tried to talk them out of it, assuring Dr. Cauthen he was one of the finest young preachers in America and with his new doctor’s degree from seminary, he would rise high in this denomination. They went to China and stayed until the Communist revolution forced them out. Then, in 1954, Cauthen was chosen to head up the worldwide missionary outreach of the Southern Baptist Convention, where he served effectively for the next quarter-century. Far from throwing away his life, he used it to make an eternity of difference for millions of lives.

“He who loses his life for my sake shall find it.” (Matthew 10:39)

3. When your organization functions well, no one notices it.

Those who like me have watched a great deal of the first week of the Beijing Olympics over television have been given an incredible privilege. At no cost whatsoever–other than buying a TV and subscribing to cable–we sit in the comfort of our living rooms and watch all these contests and games from the other side of the world. Now, having watched the Olympics for some half-century, I happen to have a little perspective which younger readers do not, and I’m here to say, you’ve got it good.

In earlier days, judges stood on the sides of the pool with stop-watches to time swimmers. Viewers missed lots of the games because a television network could cover only so many. And the networks wasted so much of the time when they should have been broadcasting the contests by too much extraneous material, giving us background stories on this swimmer or that weight-lifter. Over the decades by much trial and error, they have refined the business of telecasting the Olympics and have finally gotten it right.

But you’d never know it. NBC has not been calling our attention to what a great job they’re doing; they’re just doing it.

At some point, USA Today has to do a feature on how this network put together this billion-dollar undertaking and organized what surely must be the talents of fifty or a hundred thousand workers to beam the most efficient presentations of these games into our living rooms with never a glinch. Truly amazing.

With all those thousands working in the background, what we see is Bob Costas in a studio telling us “what’s on tonight,” then a shot of the contestants for the next game. Underneath each person is his/her name and a list of medals they have won for this race or that, this Olympics or another, and numbers indicating various records they own, whether world records, Olympic records, USA records, or personal bests. It’s mind-boggling.

Organizations are like the mechanisms of our automobiles in that when they work well, you never give them a thought. But someone has to pay the price. Someone in New York and Beijing is going without sleep and driving themselves relentlessly to pull this telecast off, and you and I are the richer for it. What a shame we’ll never know who they are.

2. The world can work together when it decides to.

That’s the point of the Olympics, to demonstrate to ourselves that it is possible for the people of every nation on the planet to come together and work in harmony.

Jokes have been made about the gaudy costumes national teams wore in the opening ceremony, but I loved it. What we saw so vividly were the individualities of each nationality. At the end, the colors were magnificent when taken as a whole.

We wonder if the Heavenly Father looks down at His Creation and sees all the colors of His people and thinks the same thing. Bet He does.

When the people of Darfur are being slaughtered or Russia invades its former state of Georgia or the Middle East explodes in violence, it’s becoming more and more apparent that the nations of the world, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, can do something about that. If they stand together and speak with one voice, they have a power over the tyrants that cannot be resisted. If they stand together. Big if.

We worked together after the tsunami of Southeast Asia, and would have worked with Myanmar if the country’s tyrannical leaders would have let us.

We’re learning.

1. And the biggest life-lesson of all from the Beijing Olympics is….

To be announced.

Since these games are not half-over, there is so much more drama to unfold, so many more stories to be told, that I’m going to leave this last slot open. Sometime this week, I’ll come back and erase these few lines and type in another story, one I think fits here.

In the meantime, use the “comments” section at the end to record your own contributions to this discussion.