Dick Howser was a beloved manager of the Kansas City Royals in the 1980s. When he resigned due to brain cancer, his wife Nancy reflected on what the experience had taught her.

She said: "As a child I was brought up to believe that it is not whether you won or lost, but how you played the game. Then in the real world, I learned you had to win to get anywhere and it didn't matter how you did it. But now, after what has happened to Dick, I realize the old way is the right way. It really and truly is how you play the game."

Three stages. The childhood wisdom. The compromise the world demands. And then — in the wilderness — the return to what was true all along.

It is striking how often it takes a crisis to clarify what actually matters. The diagnosis. The loss. The moment when the things we have been chasing suddenly look very small. The wilderness has a way of burning off everything that isn't essential and leaving us face to face with what is.

But sometimes the wilderness does something more than clarify. Sometimes it opens us in ways we never could have been opened otherwise. Not just reminding us of what we already knew — but forming something genuinely new in us. A compassion we didn't have before. A humility we couldn't have chosen. A faith that was never truly tested until now and turns out, surprisingly, to hold.

Over the past several days, we reflected on a beautiful passage from the book of Isaiah.  God spoke to people living in exile: "I am about to do a new thing." (Isaiah 43:19) Not a restoration of what was. Something new. Something that could only have come through the wilderness, not around it.

The exiles didn't just return to Jerusalem with their old values clarified. They came back changed — deepened by what they had been through in ways that would shape their faith for generations. 

Nancy Howser rediscovered something she had always known. But many of us have stories of learning something in the wilderness we could never have learned any other way.

We have one shot at this life. And the wilderness — as unwelcome as it is — has a way of making that unmistakably clear. But we don't have to wait for the crisis to ask the question the crisis eventually forces. We can ask it today.

How are you playing the game?

Prayer: Gracious god, we confess that we sometimes lose sight of what matters most — chasing the wrong things, measuring ourselves by the wrong standards. And we thank you that even the hard seasons are not wasted in your hands. Use the wilderness to clarify, to deepen, to form in us what could not have come any other way. Help us to live now the way we would want to have lived when we look back. We ask all this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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