: aground in if land

I am aground in “if-land.” It all began yesterday while working with my golf instructor. I have been working hard recently on getting my golf swing back on plane, in rhythm and square at impact. For those of you non-golfers, that means I want my swing to look like Tiger’s swing. After some quick course correction, I was on track and hitting the ball like Tiger (so what if it looks like Tiger’s swing when he was six!). That is when I ran aground in “if-land.” It began with this statement, “If only I could hit the ball like this tomorrow when I play an actual round of golf.” If-land is the mythical place I go now that I’m cresting the “hill” (you know, the one everyone goes over at a certain age). My golf game in “if-land,” is generally far superior to my game in reality-land. I almost never can bring my game fully from the practice range to the golf course.

Maybe this “if-land” can shed some light on the idea of faith. In golf, if I never actually take my swing to a competition and instead just theorize about how that shot would have looked on the course or how that chip would have landed near the cup, my reality of the experience will only be theoretical. I will only be able to measure the success of my swing changes theoretically. My golf game will only be what I can imagine.

In our faith, if we never actually compete for our beliefs, wrestle with them, navigate with them through churning waters, then we will never be able to call them our own. Instead, they remain the dreaded hand-me-downs we have talked about. To use another analogy, our faith will never feel the road because we won’t take it for a test drive. In what ways are you test driving your faith to avoid running aground in “if-land?”