We Don't Want Fair

We say we want fairness…

Until it doesn’t go our way.

In this episode, we take an honest look at how quickly we cry “that’s not fair”—while quietly hoping for grace when it benefits us.

From the golf course to our faith, this conversation exposes a hard truth:

We don’t actually want fair.

We want grace.

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Reach out to me at mark@shanktification.com or follow me on Facebook here.  I'd love to hear from you!

Transcript

Mark 0:03

Have you ever had one of those great rounds and hated it? That happened to me recently. Was I being a fierce competitor or just being a whiny baby? You tell me. Hey friends, welcome back to Shankation. My name is Mark, and I recently had one of those rounds. You know the kind where just everything is working. The driver's in play, the irons feel clean, the putts are dropping just enough. I'm coming down the stretch, walking off 17, going into 18, and I'm even par. Even par for me is a really good score. I step up to 18, one of the easiest holes on the course. I'm way down wind. Um, and then everything just kind of unravels. I had a bad drive into the bunker. Uh from there I hit it short of the greenside bunker. From there, I duff it into the bunker, I get out, and I three putt. And just like that, a triple bogey. A 75. The whole round was ruined. I shot even par through 17 holes and plus three on one hole. Now I hadn't been playing that great a golf leading up to this. Um, it was windy that day, it was kind of wet, I wasn't really taking it seriously, I was playing with a bunch of buddies and didn't really have any high expectations. If you would have told me driving up to the golf course that I would have shot a 75, I would have been ecstatic. But walking off the green, I was not ecstatic. Not because of how my round went, but because of how it ended. I couldn't even enjoy it. And I realized I wasn't judging my round as a whole, I was judging it by the last hole. I got to thinking about it on my way home, and I was reminded a couple of weeks ago I shot the same exact score, but I ended with a birdie on 18, not a triple bogey. And I remember that day being completely ecstatic of how I played. I shot the same score, but two completely different results in my head. Now here's the lie in golf, we believe. The last thing that happens is the truest thing about our round. I miss a putt late, I can't putt. I blow up on one hole, I play terrible. But the scorecard says otherwise, and here's the deeper issue. We don't just do this in golf, we do this with our lives. One bad moment, one failure, one sin, and suddenly we feel like everything is undone. We let the one hole define the whole round. Now let me take you back to the middle of that round. On one par five, I hit it deep into the woods on the left, and I get a good bounce, I hit a really good shot up into the green, and fortunately I make a bogey on that hole, which shouldn't have been a bogey, should have been much worse. There was another par three that had a back tucked pin, the bunker on the right, and I hit a shot that wasn't that great, and everything about the shot should have trickled into the bunker, but it stopped right on the edge of the fringe, and I had a pretty easy two-puck for par. And I don't think twice about those good breaks. I don't say, man, what a gift. I just write the score down and move on like I earned the hole. Now, fast forward to hole number 18, and I had a few bad shots, and suddenly I'm frustrated, like something unfair just happened to me. Do you see it? The good breaks, I call those mine. The bad breaks, those are the ones I focus on. So just pause for a second and let me ask you something. Think about your last round. Not just the score, but the moments. Where did you get a break? A putt that shouldn't have dropped, but did? A shot that should have been in trouble, but wasn't? Or a bounce that went your way? Did you call that grace? Or did you just call that normal? Or worse yet, luck? Now flip it. What's the one hole you keep replaying? The one mistake, the one swing, that one moment, that one decision that feels bigger than everything else? Why is it that we minimize the good and magnify the bad? We go to sleep at night thinking about the one or two bad shots and not thinking about all the great shots. What if what we've been calling normal has actually been grace the whole time? That's why the story that Jesus tells in Matthew chapter 20 hits so hard. There's a guy who gets up in the morning and hires a day laborer and says, Hey, if you work all day for me, I'll pay you X amount. And the day laborer said, Yeah, that's that's more than fair. I'll I'll be glad to do that. So he goes and works for him all day. He hires a couple of other guys throughout the day, and they work different amounts. One guy actually even works for just one hour, and he gets done and he goes to pay him and he writes him a check, all the same amount. And the guy that worked all day said, Wait, this isn't fair. I worked all day and I got paid the same amount that this guy that only worked one hour got. And here's what Jesus says. Starting in verse 13, but he, the landowner, answered one of them, I'm not being unfair to you, friend. Didn't you agree to work for this amount of money? Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don't I have the right to do with what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous? See, the day laborer was completely happy with the pay that he was promised in the morning. But after he saw how it all ended and who else was involved, all of a sudden he wanted more than what he was happy with 12 hours ago. He said, wait, that's not fair. And he's right, it's not. It's generous. And here's the tension. We say we want fairness, but we really don't. Because fairness means getting exactly what you earned, no more, no less. And if I'm honest about my golf round, if everything was fair, a few of those good breaks don't go my way. That 75 probably turns into something much higher. The very next verse in verse 16, Jesus makes a hard left turn and says, So the last will be first, and the first will be last. Now, come to think of it, that deserves its own podcast, so stay tuned. But here's the big idea. We don't want fairness. We want grace. In golf, we want the tree to kick it back in the fair way. We want the putt to catch the edge and fall in. We want the lie to be better than we deserve. And in life, we want the same thing. We want forgiveness we didn't earn. We want mercy when we fall short, and we want God to be generous, not fair. But here's where we get it twisted. We gladly accept grace on the first 17 holes and then demand fairness on the last one. Or worse, we accept grace from God, but deny it to ourselves. We let one bad moment define us instead of the grace that's been there all along. In Matthew chapter 20, Jesus is reminding us, this isn't about what you earned. The workers who came in late, they didn't deserve a full day's wage. The ones who came in early, they didn't earn more than what was promised to them. Everything about it is grace. And that's us. We're not standing before God with a perfect scorecard. We're standing there because of his generosity. So I had to ask myself, why did I walk off the green last week frustrated when I'd just been given a great round? Why did I focus on the one hole I messed up instead of the grace that showed up everywhere else? Remember that hole I asked you about earlier, the one you couldn't stop thinking about? Now think about all the ones you forgot to be thankful for. And think about this. Two rounds, same score, same number on the scorecard, but completely different stories in my head. The difference wasn't the round, it was what I chose to focus on. Maybe the better attitude of walking off the golf course is this. I didn't deserve that 75, but I'm thankful anyway. So the lesson for me, and hopefully for you, is not to confuse fair with good. Not to confuse fair with grace. Because if we really got what was fair, we would be miserable. Grace is always better. This is Mark. This is sanctification and a reminder to keep chasing better.