Develop to Deploy

I love golf. No game has taught me more about life. The randomness, the bad breaks (frequent), the good fortune (rare)—it all mimics life so well. Some things are in your control, many are not. Great putts don’t always fall. Solid shots sometimes bounce the wrong way.

To be good at golf requires a deep sense of resignation. The game demands intense focus—and yet, a strange detachment. A sort of paradox: care deeply in your preparation, so that you’re free not to care at all in your execution. In a very real sense, golf forces you to be philosophical.

No modern athlete models this kind of philosophical angst quite like the greatest golfer in the world right now: Scottie Scheffler.

You may not know Scheffler. He doesn’t care. Just days ago, before dismantling the field at The Open Championship en route to Major #4, Scheffler gave one of the rawest, most honest, spiritual press conference answers I’ve ever heard. At times, I couldn’t tell if I was reading Golf Digest or the Book of Ecclesiastes.

A reporter asked the question: “What drives you to keep going? What is your motivation at this point in your career?”

“You know, I think it’s kind of funny… it feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a tournament for like, a few minutes. It only lasts a few minutes—that kind of euphoric feeling. And I won the Byron Nelson Championship at home… I literally worked my entire life to become good at golf, to have an opportunity to win that tournament. And you win it, you celebrate, get to hug my family, my sister’s there. It’s such an amazing moment. And then it’s like, OK, now what are we going to eat for dinner? You know, life goes on.

Of course he’s right. Accomplishment is, by nature, fleeting. You can’t hold on to it. Why? Because there’s always something else to win. A helpful reminder to every “achiever”: More will never be enough. The only thing about our victories that can last is the glory they bring to the God who ordained them.

“But at the end of the day, it’s like, I’m not out here to inspire the next generation of golfers. I’m not here to inspire somebody else to be the best player in the world—because what’s the point? You know, this is not a fulfilling life. It’s fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it’s not fulfilling from the deepest places of your heart. There’s a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfill them in life—and then you get there and all of a sudden you get to No. 1 in the world, and they’re like, ‘What’s the point?’

Scheffler is right again. Accomplishment is “fulfilling” in the way a cheap meal at a takeout Chinese place is filling—momentarily satisfying, but it leaves you empty soon after.

The cruel irony of chasing fulfillment through success is that it’s always found in the next success. When Scheffler says that winning doesn’t fill “the deepest places of your heart,” he’s raising a warning flag to the rest of us, running full speed toward our own version of “more.”

Scheffler’s Unanswered Question

Scheffler asks the haunting question: “What’s the point?”
That question deserves an answer.

The answer is not fame. Not success. Not even fulfillment.

The answer is the glory of God.

And that’s not some lofty, super-spiritual cop-out. It’s the only answer that actually makes sense. Without God, there is no point. No point to success, no matter how enjoyable. No point to accomplishments, no matter how celebrated.

If this life is all there is, then Scottie Scheffler’s four majors and our Employee of the Month plaques will all one day be equally meaningless—faded, forgotten, and buried in the dust of history.

But if the Scriptures are true—and I’m banking everything on the fact that they are—then the eternal glory God receives from our temporal accomplishments, when we give Him the praise He is due, will echo for ages to come.

Rattling around the far reaches of the New Heaven and the New Earth might be the faint but beautiful sound of a strange and ancient song—about a gifted man who hit a small white ball into a hole in the ground… and the God who made it all, smiled.

Chad Williams