Adam Nelson is a great Olympian from the United States. His event is the shot put. As a shot-putter, he made no money, had no fame, and wasn’t even offered Olympic training. When He graduated college he had the opportunity to become an investment banker and the opportunity to possibly play in the NFL.
He turned down both.
Because of his passion to win Olympic gold for the USA in the shot put he got a regular job and spent his days going to work at 6am, and then training until midnight. He would fly from sporting event to sporting event, hoping to win enough prize money to pay for his trip.
He was broke, but he was magnificent.
By the time the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens rolled around, he was the favorite to win the gold medal in shot put. The day finally came, and Adam Nelson found himself standing in the shot put ring in the ancient Greek stadium in Olympia, Greece, the very place where the Olympics began about 2,700 years before. Here he was, in the Olympics of Olympics, competing in the only event that would take place in the original olympic stadium from two millennia before, favored to win gold for his country. All those years of training and sacrifice had brought him to that moment. And in that moment, he was spectacular. He spun, hoisted his shot put, and screamed with emotion.
And he lost.
To be specific, he got second place and a silver medal.
Eventually, partly because of injury and partly because it was just time, he retired and settled into the regular life of a man with a regular job who had, once upon a time while his children were too young to remember, stood in the original Olympic stadium and chased a dream.
Fast forward nine years from the Athens Olympics. Adam Nelson is traveling on a business trip, and he gets a phone call from the United States Olympic Committee. They tell him that it has been discovered that the man who beat him at the Athens Olympics had used performance enhancing drugs to do so. The man had been stripped of his Olympic Gold Medal, and the Committee was trying to track Adam down so that they could give it to him, the rightful gold medal winner of the Athens Olympics in the shot put. As it turned out Adam Nelson had not trained and sacrificed to live his dream, and lost.
His dream had been stolen from him.
Nine years after he stood in the ring in Athens, a representative from the Olympic Committee delivered Adam his gold medal in front of a Burger King in the food court of the Atlanta airport. Today, Adam keeps that medal in a junk drawer somewhere at his house.
Here is the moral of the story for us non-Olympians; If you need for the world around you to be nice and play fair and just generally give you a smooth path upon which to live out your dreams, you should prepare for disappointment.
No matter how hard you work, that's not how life works. Instead, we must find our foundation in something certain. Something that is bigger than us and bigger than life, while at the same time being something that you can trust. A long time ago, God promised the world something like that. A prophecy in the book of Isaiah chapter twenty eight reads,
So this is what the Sovereign Lord says: “See, I lay a stone in Zion, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone for a sure foundation; the one who trusts will never be dismayed.”
-Isaiah 28:16
That stone turned out to be Jesus. And when you are ready to be honest about the fact that you need something bigger than you and bigger than life that you can trust, He is your answer.