Does everything matter?

Remember the first Karate Kid movie? The kid asks the karate master to teach him to fight. The kid is expecting battle training but ends up washing and waxing a car, polishing a deck and painting a fence…all with specific motions. Whip on, wipe off; Paint the fence. The kid did not know what the master did. He was training and conditioning the muscles, muscle memory they call it, for specific karate movements. When the actual training and fighting came, the muscles already knew what to do. They had been trained in the everyday mundane tasks of life. Did you ever think that you are being battle trained in your kitchen? Really. How you respond in the everyday mundane tasks is preparing you to respond when things get really serious. You are practicing for when it gets really tough. When I was entering my senior year of high school, I spent half the summer with the Tennis Coach. I was the heir apparent to team captain and only returning varsity tennis player. The guys before me were WAY better athletes than I was so coach Dudley was doing all he could to help me learn how to win. I am not especially quick so a reflexive net game was out of the question. I was fairly tall, over 6’, and strong so coach Dudley settled on training my muscles to serve the ball at light speed. Every day I would have to serve a shopping basket full of balls aiming at where ever he would put the tennis can on the opposing side. I got pretty good at 1, picking up balls and 2 hitting the can. His planned worked perfectly. No one on my team could come close to me in practice. I usually practiced against Coach Dudley. In the high desert league I smoked almost every opponent. There was one player that was actually better than me overall. He had beaten me in a preseason tournament. We met again in the closing match of my high school tennis career. We split the first two sets. It was a 100 degree plus Saturday morning on a black court. There was no tie breakers back then and the match was not over until someone won the third set. Normally a set is the first to 6 games, but you must win by two. Somewhere around 12-12 in the third set it became all about conditioning and muscle memory. That was when hitting 500 serves every morning paid off. Fatigue and dehydration was setting in after the nearly 3 hour match with no breaks. Finally at 14-14 I broke his serve. I just stood at the line and let muscle memory from hours of practice hitting a can take over. His ground game was better than mine, but he could not defeat my serve. I won that match 16-14 in the third set. A college tennis scholarship came with the win. I finished #1 in the league. No way would I ever have beaten him without the hours of hitting the can in practice. I have since discovered that repetition in the little things prepares us for when it really matters. Like worshipping God in the moment instead of waiting for Sunday. Or patiently cleaning up after the toddler…for the umpteenth time today. Maybe a smile at the clerk instead of a blank face. How about an attitude check while carrying out the trash or mopping? In The Shack, Sarayu tells Mack, “If anything matters, then everything matters”. From that perspective EVERYTHING you do today will make a difference in eternity. Nothing is mundane or ordinary. It will all make a difference, so practice well.

1 Cor. 10:31 So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.
Colossians 3:23 Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men