Encourage Your "Competitors"

Another thing Bishop Stevenson spoke about is an experience that one LDS Olympic athlete did to help another athlete from a different country.

As a skier and a snowboarder myself, I was deeply impressed with the “four-minute” silver medal-winning performance of Australian LDS athlete and snowboarder Torah Bright in the half-pipe competition. She dazzled the world as she finished a virtually flawless run culminating in a backside rodeo 720. However, even more impressive and surprising to the world was the way she reached out and demonstrated Christlike love to her competitors. She noticed that American snowboarder Kelly Clark, who had a bad first run in her final round, appeared to be nervous about her second run. “She gave me a hug,” Clark recalls. “She just held me until I actually calmed down enough and I slowed my breathing. It was good to have a hug from a friend.” Kelly Clark would later join Torah on the winners’ podium as a bronze medalist. 

When asked about this unusual act of kindness toward her opponent, which could have put her own silver medal at risk, Torah simply said, “I am a competitor—I want to do my best—but I want my fellow competitors to do their best, too.” 

With that in mind, is there someone who needs your encouragement? a family member? a friend? a classmate or fellow quorum member? How can you help them with their four minutes?

Life isn't a race. It's not like in the Olympics where there can be only one or three winners (in my opinion, everyone who makes it to the Olympics is a winner, but they don't all get medals, let alone gold ones). In life, everyone can get "Gold Medals." We can all win. I don't think, as some people believe, that there are only so many spots available in heaven or that only a certain number of people will be allowed to go there. I just read a quote on Facebook (and I'm sure I've heard it earlier elsewhere), "The only person you need to be better than is the person you were yesterday." Getting to heaven isn't about who can achieve self-mastery the fastest or who can live the commandments most perfectly. It's about whether we keep the commandments and achieve self-mastery at all. As far as our personal spiritual development is concerned, it doesn't matter how well or poorly anyone else did. We each pass or fail based on our own merits, not wether we were better or worse than anyone else.

So, given that elevating another person and inspiring them to live better isn't going to jeopardize our chances of getting to heaven ourselves, we honestly have nothing to lose by helping others. Torah Bright could have lost out on her Silver Medal if the encouragement she gave Kelly Clark helped Kelly perform a better run than Torah did, but she didn't use that as an excuse to be mean or even apathetic toward Kelly. She helped her fellow competitor do the best that she could do, and so should we. In fact, showing Christlike love is a great way to improve our own spiritual standing as well, so not only will helping another person NOT hurt our chances of qualifying for the Celestial Kingdom, it'll actually help us to do so.

I love the gospel. I love situations where everyone is on the same team and we can all win together. I love it when people help each other, and we all do better as a result of that than we could have done on our own. I love helping others and I love it when I get the help I need when I need it. I also love the fact that getting into heaven isn't a competition to see who can be more righteous than everyone else. I'd be in serious trouble if it were! And last but not least, I'm very grateful for the Atonement, which, as Bishop Stevenson put it, "can make up for imperfections in our performance." I haven't had a perfect run so far (I don't think any of us have), but thanks to receiving a great deal of help from multiple people, I'm doing better than I think I could have done on my own. Now I just hope that I can pay it forward and help other people do better as well.