The King Has a Greater Aim

 A Kingdom Mindset for Sports Parents — Part 1 of 2 Romans 5:3

My son Joshua, JB to us, was heading into high school, and I was pressing in prayer about where to send him. My nature as a father is to protect, to control, to manage outcomes. I wanted the easiest environment: the right social circles, the best athletic opportunities, the smoothest path forward. Every instinct I had said: shield him.

But the Lord kept pressing on something different. Not to coddle him. To send him somewhere that would stretch him - his faith, his character, his athleticism. Somewhere with friction.

We sent JB to a big public school.

What followed was one of the hardest seasons I've experienced as a parent. There were moments, more than once, where I nearly aborted the mission. Where I wanted to step in, rescue him, and make it stop. But every time I went to prayer, I kept seeing the same image: a baby chick hatching from an egg. If you break the shell for the chick, you don't help it, you rob it. The struggle of breaking through is exactly what builds the strength it needs to survive. My intervention would have been sabotage dressed up as love.

Romans 5:3 says we glory in our sufferings, because suffering produces perseverance. Paul is not being dramatic. He is being precise. The Greek word is thlipsis: pressure, compression, the crushing weight of a winepress. And here is what nobody tells you when your kid is in the winepress: the grape doesn't want to be crushed. Neither does the child or the parent who is watching their child get crushed.

But there is no wine without it. There is no break through without the breaking. 

From the outside, JB's season looked unsuccessful. He lost his wrestle-off to represent his team at state. He didn't accomplish his athletic goals. By the scoreboard the world uses, he came up short.

But I watched something else happen. His faith grew stronger and more resilient under the pressure. He began to find his identity not in his achievements but in Christ. He learned he had worth and belonging apart from sports and that freed him to cheer genuinely for his teammates in their biggest moments. He became someone of substance that will outlast sports. In this moment I knew: by choosing the uncomfortable, I was choosing to let God shape him into the man He designed. The fire did exactly what the fire was designed to do - refine.

Here's the hardest truth for sports parents: King Jesus has a greater aim for your child than you do. His aim is not the scholarship. It is not the starting position. It is not the highlight reel. His aim is character,  the kind that survives the fire. And the pathway to that character runs directly through suffering, not around it.

The question is not how do I get my kid out of the fire. The question is: will I trust the King enough to leave them in it?