Games reflect our future lives

"The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle."

-- the Olympic Creed

Friday night, many of us watched the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Games. More than 200 countries have sent athletes to China. Watching them parade behind their national colors is always a treat for me.

Certainly the Olympics have become big business. To a certain degree, they have been corrupted. Something noble has been lost in this gradual but irreversible transition. Past bribery of Olympic organizers has been admitted, current bribery is alleged. Money is quite a temptress. It's a major economic boon to land an Olympics.

Athletes are no longer strictly amateur, in the best sense of that word. "Amateur" has come to mean, in many minds, sloppy or poor. In fact, the word used to mean "noncompensated." This change, at least, reflects honesty.

Olympians, in the main, are not well-to-do and have long chafed under the old restrictions forbidding them to take money. These were laid down by wealthy patricians who never had to worry about meeting their personal expenses. Still, watching megamillionaires play basketball for the U.S. doesn't tug at the heartstrings the way watching nonprofessionals once did. Will we ever feel again the unvarnished, pure pride of watching something like the 1980 U.S. defeat of the Soviet Union in hockey? On one magical night in Lake Placid, amateur college boys from Minnesota and New England took on the Soviet hockey machine and won.

More recently we read disappointing stories with sad regularity. One example: the tragedy of talented hopefuls like Marion Jones, who doped her way to track-and-field medals. Drug testing has become standard operating procedure.

Yes, there is much to mourn about the Olympics. An innocence has been lost that cannot be recovered. The good, however, still far outweighs the bad when it comes to these next two weeks of quadrennial international competition.

We will bear witness to inspiring stories of overcoming adversity, of sacrifice and of struggle. Nothing worthwhile and enduring comes easily. The life story of Jesus and his accomplishment on the cross remind us of the truth of my last sentence.

The main value to these games lies not in what happens on a track, in a gym or in an arena but inside the Olympic Village: Young people from every corner of the earth talking together and getting to know one another. The Olympics, at their understated core, are about promoting international understanding. Really. It's hard to hate people from country X if I shared a bathroom with country X's 100-meter sprinter.

It is too easy to develop attitudes and biases toward other nations. It's easy because we don't personally know anyone from those countries. The Olympics help to strip away those preconceptions. We need more international contact, not less.

With such exposure as provided by these games, when someone back home says, "Oh, those Chinese, you know what they're all about," an athlete can reply, "Excuse me, but I actually know a Chinese national, and that's not my experience at all."

Jesus gathered around him a group of men who were not terribly open-minded toward others. They believed God was in the business of helping and saving them and their people, not the despised Gentiles. Jesus disabused this notion when he said, "I have sheep in other folds. I must bring them also ... so there will be one flock and one shepherd." (John 10:16) Jesus loved his friends enough not to let them wallow in their prejudices.

Forgive me, but I'll be looking for Christ at the Olympiad. I'm all but certain I'll find him there -- somewhere.

Jeff Long is pastor of Centenary United Methodist Church in Cape Girardeau. Married with two daughters, he is of Scots and Swedish descent, loves movies and is a lifelong fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers.