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A new slant on competition
Originally appeared on spirituality.com
My husband and I had submitted individual stories to a storytelling competition and were surprised to hear that we’d each made the finals. This meant that we’d receive a pass to the national festival and would be performing our stories in front of an audience. The prize? $2,000.
Friends of ours laughed when they heard both my husband and I would be contenders for the prize. But I couldn’t help feeling that God didn’t create any of His children to compete for attention or praise. Since contests like the one we were taking part in are sometimes known to be ego-centered or lacking in warmth, I decided to pray for a few weeks before the event to get a more spiritual view of competition. One day, while sitting on my lounge searching for some answers, a fresh idea came to me.
I thought about the colors radiating from a prism. In this analogy, the prism is God and we’re the different colors reflected out from it. Each color is unique, yet each still comes directly from the prism. None of the colors competes against each other. And since God is all-powerful good, there could be no negative sense of competition. God doesn’t “compete” against Himself. All a competition, or contest, could do is show different aspects and qualities of God in myriad ways.
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