Sports

Sporting events can be some of the best metaphors in life. At the last volleyball match, BYU should have won in 3 games, but it went 5 games. BYU dropped the first game after leading due to errors. BYU won games 2 and 3, but gave CSU a lot of points on errors. CSU won game 4, again errors. Game 5 was the best played game of the match for BYU. CSU actually had to earn all 11 points they scored, and CSU ended up coughing up 6 points to BYU in hitting errors.

Volleyball is possibly the only sport where an error is a point to the opponent. Errors in other sports sometimes have no bearing on the outcome of the event. In football, for example, the ball carrier can fumble and still have a net positive effect. An error in volleyball is always a point to the "bad guys".

Similarly volleyball's hitting efficiency stat, roughly equivilent to a baseball batting average, takes errors into account. Hitting efficiency is kills (successful attacks) minus errors divided by attempts. More correctly stated, hitting efficiency is the net points (like gross and net income, not volleyball net) scored per attempt. It looks like a batting average, but it's different.

In the CSU vs. BYU match there were stretches where BYU gave CSU 5+ points in a row. Sometimes a serving error, sometimes a hitting error, but an error each time. The errors don't always make a difference in the final tally, as was the case in games 2 and 3, but they raise the difficulty and pressure.

Our struggles in life are very much like this. I once read an analogy that compares our journey in life to a path on a slope, as opposed to the common image of a fork in the road. With the sloped path, like the forked road, there are two options. Unlike the fork, where both options move forward, the two options are up and down. Volleyball provides the best metaphor here. If we're going through life without making errors, we are moving up. If we are making errors we are moving down. Successful life, like volleyball, involves eliminating errors.