Jeremy Abbott and Freedom in Failure

Nick Lannon, editor-in-chief of LIBERATE, wrote an amazing gospel reflection on figure skater Jeremy Abbott’s epic fall last night during his routine:

It is when we can look ourselves in the mirror and be honest about what we see: failings, sins, and shortcomings, that we can begin to live our lives with some measure of freedom. As long as we look in that mirror and tell ourselves that glory is possible (Olympic or otherwise), we’ll be like Jeremy Abbott before “the fall”: a nervous wreck. We’ll be terrified of exposure, of failure…of being outed as frauds.

Admitting from the beginning that we are a failure in need of profound rescue from the outside makes it all the easier to accept that salvation. Martin Luther famously said that the quest for glory could never be satisfied; that it must be extinguished. This is perhaps most clearly obvious during the Olympics. For every gold medal awarded, there are hundreds of athletes who leave with their arms in slings, their egos bruised, and their dreams crushed. In the same way, for every Mother Teresa, there’s a you and me. Of course, our freedom is even better than Abbott’s: our errors, our embarrassing falls, and our public disgraces have been give to a substitute. His perfect score has been given to us. We now live secure in the knowledge that when the “judges” (the Judge) regard us, they see only God’s blameless son, Jesus Christ. The next time Jeremy Abbott skates that program, that fall will come back to him. He’ll worry about it, and hope it doesn’t happen again. Our falls can never come back to us. They were nailed to a cross 2,000 years ago.

Read the rest here.