LiveDifferent Challenge (41): Work On Your Left

From the time I was big enough to hold a basketball, up until I started college, sports were a pretty all-consuming part of my life.  That may come as a surprise to you seeing that I can’t even remember the last time I shot a basketball, but from about 8-18 that was my life.  With a dad who sleeps, eats, and breathes sports (and was our school’s athetic director, PE teacher, and coach), I guess it’s in my blood.

Basketball was probably my favorite sport, at least the one that was most all-consuming.  Not only did we have the regular season, we always had a huge pre-season schedule, plus summer-league, plus individual summer basketball camps, plus team camp.  I loved it.

And yes, I did really well.  But you know what? In retrospect I think the one thing that kept me from really being outstanding was that I never disciplined myself to work on my left.  My natural strengths were speed (at least relative to other high school girls), defense, and rebounding.  I had killer bony elbows that could clean out the bottom of the key in no-time flat.  But just like is so natural, I really only worked on my strengths.  My weakness was my left hand.

As a good defender, your job is to know your man (woman). Is she a good shooter? Can she dribble both ways?  Does she like to fake?  What are her favorite moves?  The better you know your opponent, the better you can tailor your defense strategy to capitalize on her weaknesses.  Someimes you might here a coach shout to his player, playing defense, “She’s got no left!”  Which just means you can exaggeratedly guard her right hand side, knowing that she can’t dribble to the left to save her life.  This gives you a huge advantage, obviously.

All that to say that I think what really makes an outstanding basketball player (and why I would never have qualified myself as outstanding), is that they know how to work on their left, so to speak. They know how to identify their areas of weakness, and take special attention to develop those areas.  I really never did that.  I liked to shoot baseline jumpers and free-throws, scrap like mad for rebounds, and make my opponent furious by guarding like a hound dog.  But a truly great player will instead focus on their weakness–they’ll work on their left.

I remember one particular circumstance where this was costly.  I played softball in junior high, but was horrible at sliding.  I could hit, catch, throw…not slide.  I could never get it right.  And instead of working on it, I just avoided sliding.  One game, I was stealing third and my coach was shouting, “Down down down!” (to slide).  I didn’t.  I was too scared.  And then I was thrown out.  “I told you to slide!” he yelled at me.  I hung my head and walked over to the bench.  How frustrating it is when we’re in a crunch situation and we’ve not prepared ourselves to meet the challenge.  How frustrating when we realize, “If only I’d worked on my left.” 

So this coming week I have the joy again of teaching at Multnomah.  This class is on Women’s Leadership, and we’ll be discussing character qualities of a leader.  As I’m studying through dozens of different key character qualities, the thing that keeps coming back to my mind is the importance of working on your left.  Being punctual, organized, enthusiastic, warm, and hard-working is not a challenge for me.  So it’d sure be easy if I just capitalized on those things and sat around feeling good about myself.  (And yes, there is a value in finding a work/ministry situation that revolves around your strengths–that’s common sense.)  But when it comes to, let’s see, patience, flexibility, going with the flow without an agenda, willingness to follow without clear direction, “wasting time” with people–those are my “lefts”.  And do I work on them? 

So I’ll write more later about the Character Qualities of a Leader.  But for today, our challenge is simply to sit down for a moment and evaluate–honestly–an area or two of weakness.  How easy it is for the enemy to “defend” us when he knows we’ve “got no left”!  How much more effective we would be as Christian ministers, parents, spouses, and friends, if we had the ability to “go either way”.  How much more confident we would be if we knew we could slide into third base if we had to.  What is it that you don’t want to work on?  What is your left?  And how can you become more of a threat to the enemy, and a more powerful weapon in the hand of our God?  Let’s work on our left.