Amber Glenn of the United States competes during the figure skating women’s team event at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan. Competition whether you win or lose can teach you a lot about yourself, as Glenn demonstrated over the course of the Olympics.
We’ve just had the pleasure of watching the greatest athletes in the world compete during the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. Witnessing the drive and endurance, the stories of dedication and sportsmanship has been inspiring.
As Olympic great Jesse Owens said, “The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself — the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us — that’s where it’s at.”
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Those invisible and inevitable battles can help you grow spiritually. Whether it is pickleball, soccer, tennis or golf, competitive sports are a wonderful tool for growth because they challenge us in so many ways.
They challenge us in how we win. They challenge us in how we lose. They challenge us in how we deal with struggle. We compete against superior players and inferior players. We make mistakes, and we have excellent shots. We face challenges and have to adjust.
Inhabiting God’s beauty, goodness and truth in our lives extends to the sports arena. That is truly leaving no stone unturned. Instead of glossing over our reactions, our thoughts and our feelings, these experiences can be a treasure trove for our personal growth if we take some time for self-reflection.
Corrin Gani is a minister with The Church of the Path.
Competitive sports bring to the surface a lot of issues that sometimes we don’t even want to think about — how we win, how we lose, our ethics, our sportsmanship, our attitudes during the game.
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Spiritual growth involves reflecting on our everyday life, and identifying our misconceptions, wrong thinking, bad attitudes and negative behaviors. Once they are raised to consciousness, we can then work with them. We can reeducate those places and transform them into healthy attitudes. We can change our thinking. We can correct our behavior. Being aware of our unhealthy approaches, we can replace them with healthy ones.
If I win, there is always room for improvement. There will always be players that are better than me. The healthy approach is to remain humble. I shouldn’t rest on my laurels.
If I lose, it is just a game. I can look at my lacks and failures with proportion, as an opportunity to grow. As tennis great Steffi Graf said, “You can’t measure success if you have never failed.”
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You can transfer these lessons to all areas of your life. Sports are a beautiful tool to bring to the surface and raise to consciousness unrefined areas of ourselves. They are places to look at, places to explore and reeducate, places on which to shed God’s light.
It’s a wonderful part of the growth process to put yourself in a place where you will be challenged, where you will have to face these issues, and you will have to reckon with parts of yourself that usually remain hidden.
We don’t grow where we are comfortable. We grow where we are stretched and challenged. That’s what life is about — stretching ourselves, refining ourselves, and purifying ourselves in all areas of our being.
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Corrin Gani is the minister of The Church of the Path, a church that unifies Western and Eastern traditions, focusing on personal spiritual growth. She is also an avid tennis player. churchofthepath.org
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