For The Love Of The Game

For The Love Of The Game by Frank David Heslop

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I thought quite hard on how I should start off and what I should write about in my first essay and then it hit me. I thought let me start with how I started off in sport.

I remember as a child why I used to play the beautiful game. It was never about achieving anything great in the beginning, yet I trained so damn hard as if I was trying to achieve something though. On the journey of becoming a sportsman (high school years), I started on a high note but then I suddenly reached a tough patch. I have had some tough fighting, situations that I could not see myself overcoming. The thought of giving up would sometimes find its way into my thoughts, but I always had great people in my life to keep me going.

I would fall down and pick myself up again and again, with the help of my great family. Yet one thing I did not learn was to overcome the disappointment and anger of falling. Falling is the best way to learn and develop. However one needs to learn to fall without hurting oneself so badly that it takes too long to recover. This was the biggest problem with me at the time: that when I fell it would take something valuable away from me and I would either not recover properly or take too long to recover.

So to get back to the point of why I used to play the beautiful game as a child. It was because I loved playing it. I had no one telling me that I should give up because I am not good enough and even if I did I would not even care because I was playing the game for the right reason, because I loved it. I did not care about the coach’s or anyone’s opinion, I just wanted to play because it brought me joy. I could spend hours outside or in the yard kicking the ball around because of the love I had for the game.

Now whenever you in a tough patch in your sports career, remember why you started playing the sport in the first place and try to play it exactly the same way that you did as a child, with joy and happiness. Then when you fall, you will fall with joy and even though you might get hurt falling you will always be able to get back up. Picture a baby trying to transition from crawling to walking, they will fall a thousand times, sometimes they laugh and sometimes they cry but they will always fall just hard enough to pick themselves back up again.

My final words are the most important of all from 1 John 4:7-8. It says; “Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love”. At the end of this scripture it says that “God is love” meaning that if you play with love and for love, you are playing with God and for God because He is love and He has created love. So that feeling you get whenever you feel as if you enjoying the sport or game so much that you say you love it, that is God right by you guiding you because you are playing with Him by your side.