Not too long ago we were invited to a fund-raising bowl-a-thon. My wife and I bowled a bit in college, and we’re also quite accomplished at video-game bowling on the Wii. So when our friends asked us to join their bowling team, we said, “yes!”
It seems so simple: you have this big, heavy ball, and you just roll it down to where those ten pins are standing, waiting to be knocked over. You see it on TV: pins crashing and flying everywhere. In your mind you can do this. You don’t think twice about the germs in the rental shoes or on the bowling balls that have been used for 40 years. You just pick out a ball, stride to the line, and try not to fling yourself down the lane.
Well, our team didn’t win. But we sure laughed a lot and high-fived when we knocked down a few pins. Oddly enough, at the end of the last game, I had a pretty good score going. But in the final throw of my final frame, I thought I’d be funny and try a like-you-see-on-TV trick shot. Which of course went straight into the gutter. Game over. Even a player from the next lane laughed.
But as it turns out, the prize winner for the highest score was just a few pins more than mine. And they won a super nice prize! If I had known how close I was, you can believe I would’ve taken that last roll more seriously! So the lesson (my teammates were quick to point out) is: always do your best. Or as the Bible tells us, “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might” (Ecclesiastes 9:10). In bowling or in life, spare no effort.
