Win Lose and Draw

Monday, 26th November 2007

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I had taken part in my company's annual bowling tournament. It was held at Safra Tampines.

I had signed up with 4 others from the IT department, whom I had gotten to know through our weekly Christian fellowship.

A couple of them stay in Tampines, so they made their own way there. The other 2 stay in Redhill and Bukit Timah respectively, so I arranged to fetch them from Tampines MRT at 8.55am.

I had recently installed a GPS in my car. Whenever a route is planned, the system prompts 3 options --
- fastest time,
- shortest distance, or
- use off-roads

When "fastest time" is selected, the system will recommend the use of the highways, ie. PIE, TPE, KJE, ECP, etc.

When "shortest distance" is selected, the system will recommend the most direct path.

"Use off-roads" is more applicable to countries like USA, UK and Australia.

I had stored both Tampines MRT and Tampines Safra as "favourites". I left my home just after 8am. Since I had more than 45 minutes to get to Tampines MRT, I decided to choose "shortest distance" instead of "fastest times".

Normally, I would travel by TPE or PIE if I was heading towards Tampines, but it was only then I discovered that the shortest route was actually via Kaki Bukit and Bedok Reservoir Road!

Upon arriving at Tampines MRT at about 8.41am, and as I sat in the car waiting for my 2 team members to arrive, something dawned upon me. Many of us prefer to travel by the highways because we are familiar with them, not realising that most often that not, we actual end up travelling a much longer distance.

In the same way, many of us who have been Christians for many years prefer to stick to the familiar and comfortable, not wanting to rock the boat, as it were. However, we may not realise that there may be spiritual truths in the Bible just waiting to be uncovered. A churchmate of mine who embraces grace teachings used the following analogy. Sure, we will all arrive at our destination, but why toil and sweat under the hot sun by walking there, when God has provided us with a vehicle to get there?

Anyway, my 2 team members arrived slightly before 9am, so we made our way to Safra Tampines. Our team was called "KFC Combo 1, upsize, coleslaw change to cheese fries, thank you... yes, having here", the name being coined courtesy of a team member who attends City Harvest. The organiser conveniently abbreviated it to just "KFC Combo 1" :-(.

Here's a picture that was taken of our team.

After the 1st game, I looked at the scoreboard and noticed that we were in 24th place. The bowling alley has 24 lanes, and 24 teams were taking part, so you do the math... :-)

Knowing we were completely out of the running, we decided to continue to just play just for fun. When we finished bowling at 12.15pm, we decided to call it a day even though the event was supposed to be until 1.30pm.

At the risk of sounding like sour grapes, the situation suited us just fine. I had to get home by 2pm for my son's room dedication (which I will blog about tomorrow). The chap from City Harvest had an afternoon service to attend, while the other team members also had to rush back home.

[Afternote: I found out today that we remained in 24th place after all 3 games, but on the positive side, our combined pinfalls per game improved from 422 to 449 to 589].

So the other lesson drawn here is that we may have been losers in the sight of men, but winners because of the team spirit and camaradarie, and also in the sense of being more than conquerors in Christ. Amen?