Remembering how to lose properly

Sorry I haven't been posting much this week, I've been feeling a bit under the weather. It's a weird sinus thing...my nose isn't really that congested but my entire face and one side of my jaw hurts so bad that its really distracting, and I just feel pretty yucky overall. At any rate, I've been just laying low most of the week, only doing the bare minimum to get through each day. (No, workouts have not made that cut. Sorry, but being upright hurts!)

The only thing new this week is that my daughter's volleyball team finally lost a game on Tuesday (they were like 9-0 before that) and it was so upsetting for her! She cried off and on for like 2-3 hours, it was so sad. She so wanted to get through the season with a perfect record. She spent hours picking apart her own game, even though the few mistakes she made weren't the reason they lost. She made herself miserable instead of just realizing losses happen and moving forward.

I was really surprised to find that I wasn't too upset over the loss. Her team used to be so bad that they only won one game the first year, but they've improved so much over the past couple of years that now they've forgotten how to lose. In their minds, they became invincible. Me? I think balance is good. Losing means learning to properly deal with disappointment and it also adds a nice, healthy dose of humility.

Hmmmm. Betcha that can translate over to our lives, right? It's no secret that I often struggle because of God not answering our prayers and therefore allowing both big and small losses in our lives....but then I remember that when everything is awesome we tend to cruise along on 'us' power. We forget how helpless and dependent on God we really are! We sometimes lose our humility and our focus turns to the physical instead of the spiritual. We forget we're in a battle. We forget there is more to life than what we can see.

So, perhaps we need to be thankful for the losses in life, even though they definitely don't feel good and they tend to make us cry. Balance is good, and God surely knows that better than we do. Of course, this only works when we allow the loss to turn our attention back to God. Spending too much time focusing on ourselves (like my daughter was doing) only adds to the misery and replays the loss over and over in our heads.

Well, what do you know? Even through the grossness and inactivity of my week, God taught me a little lesson. So tell me...are there any losses recently in your life that have turned out to be blessings in disguise?