life is like golf

Many years ago someone from the church I used to serve invited me to play golf with him. Other than crazy golf and the occasional ‘pitch and putt’ with my family I had not really played golf before but I thought I would give it a try as he said I could borrow his old clubs.

I have to say that my companion was incredibly gracious and encouraging, and I started playing occasionally. Since I have been in Plymouth I have been playing once every six weeks or so, and I have been taking lessons. I am certainly much better than I was on that first round of golf in Colchester but I am still not very good.

Golf is a game where, for most mortals, we imagine what the shot will look like before we hit the ball and then try and find where it went after we have hit a shot that didn’t go anywhere near where we intended. An average golf course may be around 6,000 yards long (just under 3.5 miles). But the way I play, zigzagging across the fairways, I probably add another half a mile to that, along with time spent in bushes and long grass trying to find the wayward ball.

But, just occasionally, you hit the ball exactly as you intended and it flies serenely down the fairway, and the next one pitches gently onto the green, and you end up close enough to the hole that you might get a par, or even a birdie. The pressure on those putts is immense!

I was watching the AIG Women’s Open highlights and they have a running scorecard at the bottom of the screen to show who’s currently in the lead. It struck me that you have to work very hard over a number of holes to go up the leaderboard (making birdies and perhaps even an eagle) but you can slide down it with just one bad hole. It feels quite cruel. You could hit birdies and pars on 17 of eighteen holes, but have one nightmare hole where you find several bunkers and miss some putts and your whole round is ruined. It doesn’t seem fair.

In the highlights I was watching two women were tied for the lead at the end of the tournament so, to decide the winner, they had a play-off where they both played the 18th hole until one of them got a better score. They tied first time around and then on the second time the eventual winner hit a great drive down the middle of the fairway and the second placed golfer hit a slightly wayward drive to where the crowd were watching. It would have been okay from there, but unfortunately the ball hit someone on their heel and bounced backwards into a gorse bush. From there the result was almost certain. It wasn’t fair.

I think humans are hardwired (created in the image of the Creator) to want things to be fair. Isn’t one of the first things children say when they don’t like something: “It’s not fair!”? And that’s the thing. Life is like golf. It isn’t fair.

Why would God create a world like that? There are lengthy academic tomes written on this subject and I can’t hope to do it justice in a minor bloggage like this, but I think part of the answer is that while there is an element of randomness about the level of impact, we live in a world where we can rely on the certainty of knowing that actions will usually result in some foreseeable consequences. It’s an extremely complex world, we don’t live in an individual bubble, so there are other factors over which we don’t have control, but we can control some things.

By mishitting her drive off the fairway it was likely that the golfer would have a difficult second shot, but there were lots of factors outside her control that decided how difficult it would be. Hit it down the fairway and she would have had a much easier shot.

Driving a car recklessly will likely result in an accident. The level of injury caused depends on a number of factors outside our control, but there if we don’t drive recklessly we’re more likely to avoid injury.

Saying something unkind to someone will adversely affect the relationship we have with them. How badly it is affected depends on the other person’s response, over which we have no control, but if we don’t say unkind things we won’t adversely affect the relationship.

I hope you see my point.

Be blessed, be a blessing