Practice Makes Perfect

We’ve all heard it before. Most have even said it at some point or another. Sunday before last, I was at basketball practice with my junior boy’s basketball team. I challenged them with a drill that they had never done before. They had to have a full court scrimmage against each other, but the catch was they could not dribble the ball. We tend to dribble too much, so I wanted them to practice passing the ball a little better. You would have thought I had asked them to do something terribly difficult. They complained and whined like a bunch of little kids. We kept at it, eventually moving to something a little more enjoyable. Fast forward to this past Saturday in our game. We jumped all over our opponent in the first half, sprinting out to a 19-3 lead. They played so well and passed the ball better than they have all season. The crowning moment for me was when one of the biggest complainers about the passing exercise lends forward and says to me, “Coach, I guess that passing drill worked.” Indeed.

Last Wednesday, in choir practice, our director had us singing in a very different and unique way. As a voice major at USC, Craig knows little tricks of the trades that many choir members pass off as silly or ridiculous. He knows what he is doing, but it doesn’t stop some of our members from hemming and hawing about the silly exercises he puts us through. Again, they sounded a bit like a bunch of little kids. The kicker is that when it came time to sing the song we were working on, we pulled it off better than expected. Yet again, practice, no matter how awkward and different, truly paid off.

I wonder how it this relates to our lives as Christians. John Wesley believed that we all are working towards Christian Perfection. While we often fall very short of that goal, the point is that we are always supposed to be improving ourselves as faithful disciples of Christ. And, based on the previous two scenarios of life, it means that we should be practicing, and not just going through the same routines and motions. Instead, we should be challenging ourselves, doing things that are often times uncomfortable and not natural for us. I wonder what that would look like. Lent is coming up in a month and what a better time to put ourselves in situations that make us uncomfortable and to practice our faith in a different and unique way. After all, practice makes perfect.