Life lessons are often learned in sports. I once learned a life lesson while reading a magazine article about a football game.
In 1967, the University of Tennessee had an excellent football team. Coached by Doug Dickey and led by their star quarterback, Dewey Warren, the team would win 9 of their 10 regular season games before losing to Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl.
The only time they were behind in a game the entire regular season was during the last four minutes of their first game. In that game, on September 16, 1967, they were leading the UCLA Bruins 16-13 with four minutes left in the game. UCLA had the ball at the Tennessee 27 yard line. It was fourth down with two yards to go. The UCLA quarterback, Gary Beban (who would win the Heisman Trophy later that year), ran a run-pass option play to the right.
A week later, reading a magazine article about the game, I looked at the photos of that play taken from the game film, as I read the captions underneath. The first caption read, “Beban starts his climactic play by rolling out toward the right. Spotting a small hole he cuts into it.”
The following captions would describe how he evaded the linemen, the linebacker, and the halfback to run 27 yards for the game-winning score. But I kept going back to the caption that said, “Spotting a small hole.” I looked at that picture; I looked again, and I looked again. All I could see were giant Tennessee linemen blocking Beban’s way. I saw no hole. But Gary Beban saw a small opening, and he was prepared to take advantage of it.
I want large openings in life. I want a hole big enough to drive a truck through. When a door opens for me, I want it to be garage-door sized. But life is not like that, sometimes it only gives us small openings. Sometimes it only gives us brief opportunities.
We each know only a miniscule fraction of the billions of people on Earth. There is a slightly larger fraction of those billions that we have some sort of contact with – we pass them on the street, we sit next to them in a restaurant, we pay them in a store, we receive unsolicited phone calls from them, etc., etc. Any of these people may occasionally present small openings to us that allow us to have a positive effect on their lives. Like the quarterback, we can make good use of these small openings if we are prepared and have a prepared attitude.
Jesus told His disciples about the importance of small openings. He said an act of good toward one of the least of His brethren was like it was done for Him. (Matthew 25: 37-40) An act of good may be as simple as a cup of water. (Mark 9:41)