Reflecting on Rio

The Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro are now in the history books, as they say. For the most part they were successful but with every Olympic Games there are controversies, if not outright scandals. Where there are people, a mix of good and bad things happen. There were those who got caught doping. Never fails. We all watched American swimmer Ryan Lochte and his teammates act up and then try to cover it up with lies only to get caught. He's no longer a spokesman for Speedo. Or Ralph Lauren. Or anyone else. Then there was the water - the dirty lakes and the green-water pool - and the crime and the have-nots living in the squalor of the Brazilian favelas (slums). There were winners and losers and those who, in losing, were winners.

We saw the two female runners who collided. Nikki Hamblin of New Zealand fell during the 5,000-meter race and took American Abbey D’Agostino down with her. D’Agostino helped Hamblin get back up and the two resumed running. Later, D’Agostino fell on the track suffering from a torn ACL. Hamblin then returned the favour and helped D’Agostino get back up and together they crossed the finish line. The two women didn't know each other before that day. Neither won but neither lost. 

Gymnasts Lee Eun-ju of South Korea and Hong Un-jong of North Korea are technically enemies because of political hostilities but they took selfies together before they competed in their event. Buds for life, it would seem. Forget the politics.

The noble Fijian men's rugby team that beat New Zealand in the quarter finals and then beat Britain to win the gold medal, the only medal Fiji has ever won, bowed before Princess Anne when receiving their medals.

And there's more: An Irish boxer named Michael Conlan threw a fit. Publicly. He launched into a profanity-laced diatribe to the media after losing a quarter final match to his Russian opponent after some faulty calls by the judges. Meanwhile, back home in Ireland, five-year-old Finn McManus heard about it. With the help of his older sister, he wrote a letter to Conlan and included with it his own medal that he won at school. McManus wrote, “I want you to have my school medal because you are a winner. I hope you like it.” Conlan was speechless for a time.

The heavily-favourited American sprinter Allyson Felix showed great grace in defeat in the 400 metre race, a race she would have won had Shaunae Miller of the Bahamas not made a last second dive over the finish line. Many criticized Miller's leap - which was legal - but not Felix. She congratulated her right away. 

And my favourite: Meet Piotr Malachowski of Poland. You may not remember him but he won the silver medal in discus throwing. Instead of keeping his well-earned hardware, though, he auctioned it off just today, in fact, to raise money for a three-year-old boy from back home who has retinoblastoma, a rare cancer of the eye. (The total amount needed, by the way, was raised with that sale). Maybe he took his cue from American swimmer Anthony Ervin. Ervin won gold in Rio in the 50 metre freestyle. He also won the gold medal in that same event at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and later sold it and gave the money to help the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

There are more stories like these not included in this post. The goodwill shown at the Rio Games will last a lot longer than the shine on the medals won there.

Lessons from an American Tragedy

Today marks the forty-second anniversary of the resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon. He quit because he had to. The corruption of the Watergate scandal finally reached his desk where the buck stopped. 

For those who are unfamiliar with this scandal, it began in May of 1972 when some people working to get the President re-elected broke into the Democratic National Committee's campaign headquarters which was set up in a hotel/office building called The Watergate in the Foggy Bottom neighbourhood of Washington, D.C. They bugged some phones for the purpose of stealing intelligence from the opposing campaign in order to gain the advantage. On a subsequent break-in in June, the burglars got caught. Nixon himself wasn’t aware of the scheme at first but some people on his re-election committee had ordered it. This is a complex story filled with intrigue, hubris, dirty tricks and obstruction of justice by some of the highest office holders in the land. To make a long story short, as the President found out about certain things, he attempted to cover them up. That made him guilty of obstruction of justice and other things, so he had to leave office or face certain impeachment and conviction.

Caught up in this scandal was Charles Colson, special counsel to the President, who occupied an office right beside the Oval Office. Colson was eventually arrested and charged for his part in the cover-up and spent almost two years in prison. After he was charged and his life was coming apart, Colson became a Christian. After serving his time, he founded a ministry that is still flourishing today called Prison Fellowship. So began Colson’s new life. (To find out more, read his book Born Again).

In his book called The Good Life, Colson wrote about one of his colleagues who also served time but never really turned around. His name was John Ehrlichman who served as President Nixon's special advisor on domestic affairs. In late 1998, years after the scandal, Colson went to visit Ehrlichman who was gravely ill with kidney disease in an Atlanta nursing home. Toward the end of his visit, Colson and his friend were discussing Ehrlichman’s situation and here is a portion of that conversation from his book.

“All at once, he (Ehrlichman) said, ‘The doctor says with a little shot of morphine, he can put me out of things. There’ll be no pain. I’ll just go to sleep. Nobody cares about me anyway. Why should I stay alive? Tell me. Why should I stay alive?’ Cold chills raced up and down my back. He was serious and I wanted to give him the best answer I could muster. I struggled to choose my words carefully. A life was in the balance. I told John that his life was not his own, that it was a gift from God. I assured him that his life was created in God’s own image, which gave him an innate dignity, a dignity unaffected by circumstances.” A few paragraphs later, Colson wrote, “The reason John Ehrlichman asked that question in such a despairing frame of mind was, I am convinced, because he saw his life, first and last, as his.” By his, he meant his own.

Ehrlichman died a very sick and lonely man on February 14, 1999. Colson did have the opportunity to visit with him one more time but during his friend’s final days, Colson had a bout of the flu so he sent one of his associates to pray with John. During the prayer, he just nodded and said nothing so Colson never knew for sure if his friend and former colleague made things right with his Maker in that eleventh hour. John Ehrlichman saw his life as his own and in the end, he had nothing. He was married three times. His kids didn’t have much to do with him. All the people who once lined up to see him, whose respect he once commanded, were all gone. In the end, he saw no point to his life and because he made it his own - all about him - there was no point to his life that he could see.

Jesus said, “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel's will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul? For what will man give in exchange for his soul?” The paradox of keeping what you give to God and losing what you keep for yourself is a difficult one to grasp, but it is true. History bears it out. Our biggest problem is that we stubbornly refuse to learn from history.

Why is Watergate still worth discussing more than a generation later? When you probe the whole thing and learn about what was done it reveals a number of stark realities. First, otherwise respectable people are capable of very dark deeds. Second, it's a grim reminder of the capacity of the human heart to self-deceive. All the dirty tricks done by the Committee to Re-elect the President were unnecessary because the Democratic campaign under its nominee, George McGovern, was anemic and imploding. Nixon won by a landslide in November 1972 and would've won it without much effort. His re-election committee had a siege mentality and resorted to drastic measures when no real battle was underway. Third, it was a text book example of how an organization can take on the characteristics of its leader. In the unseen world, kindred spirits tend to find each other because birds of a feather flock together.