By now the jokes are all over the place … “Before he got into football, Robert Green was a bus driver. But he got fired because he couldn’t make any stops.” … or … “At least that’s one British spillage the Americans won’t be moaning about…“ And so on and so on.
Suffice to say Saturday night was not Robert Green’s night. The massive goal-keeping blunder gifted the USA a draw in England’s opening game in the World Cup. After all the speculation from pundits and fan’s, Fabio’s opening choice went against him spilling the heat from an entire nation onto the shoulders of one man.
Dig down through the Tweets and Facebook comments, the jokes and the mocking and you simply have a blunder for which only Green is accountable.
Fair play to the man, he acknowledged his error early on and even kept enough nerve to pull of a great save to keep the match at evens. But now he – and the rest of England – wait to see if he’ll be starting the next game.
The thing is, these things happen. They happen to professional football players and other athletes. They happen to business people and school teachers. Something like this could happen to any one of us. The simple thing is we mess up, and sometimes we mess up big.
In our Christian walk when we do mess up big we have a choice about what to do. Do we own our mistakes, our sin, our stupid choices? Or do we navel-gaze and wonder what could have been?
As Christian men in battle we have scant time for naval gazing. We must own our sin and deal with it and move on. That may mean we’re put on bench for a while but we’re never out of the fight.
The prayer of forward-looking sinner might be this:
Rejoice not over me, O my enemy;
when I fall, I shall rise;
when I sit in darkness,
the Lord will be a light to me.
I will bear the indignation of the Lord
because I have sinned against him,
until he pleads my cause
and executes judgment for me.
He will bring me out to the light;
I shall look upon his vindication.
Micah 7:8,9
Onwards and upwards guys.
