play your part

Cleaning out my basement, I found a blue ribbon.

It's from a fourth grade school track meet. A relay race. I was an alternate; I'd only run if someone on the track team didn't come to school.

"Where's Andy?" I asked my teacher when I got to class. He wasn't at his desk. "He's not here today," my teacher replied. The knots of excitement and reticence stirred in me.

He would've ran first in the relay dash. This meant I'd run first in the relay dash.

I have zero memory recall from this day, save for one:

All I recall: frantically running off the starting line when that starter pistol fired. I had the inside lane. I could see every other team's first runner in front of me in their lanes. Dashing forward, as fast as my 10-year-old legs could advance me, to get to our next runner  -- cannot remember that dude's name whatsoever. Executing a mildly awkward yet sufficiently successful baton pass. And then walking off the track, onto the grass near the high jump in the springtime sun, to watch the rest of the race develop.

We won!

All four of us could've run farther than we did. But we ran our part, and that's it. We were better as a team, because we let others do their parts. We stuck to our  We didn't have to completely exhaust ourselves to finish our portion of the run. 

"And he said, 'The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come." -Mark 4:26-29

This relates to the above parable. We really don't have to take everything on ourselves to ensure that anything gets done. Sometimes, we have the equivalent of a cameo or walk-on role in something happening. It's OK to not have a bigger role sometimes. God's got this too. We get to scatter seed. How the rest works out, we don't always need to know every detail (sometimes, of course, we really do. But not as often as we think). 

You study well, and do the best you can do, and go play your part and take that exam.

You work hard in a role or an office. You do the best you can do, and then you hand off responsibilities to someone else.

You clean up the portion of the relational or actual mess that's your responsibility. Then you let someone else tend to their portions.

You speak your heart in love, put yourself out there. You can only do so much, and then you wait for someone to reply in kind.

We can't run every part of a relay race.

We can't play tennis on both sides of the net in the same match.

We can't pitch and catch at once (only Bugs Bunny can, and it was a stretch even for him).

So play your part.