St. Josemaría was never an athlete. Other saints, like St. John Paul II, are remembered for loving physical activity, but the founder of Opus Dei kept coming back to sport as an image of the Christian struggle. That’s because the whole history of the Church is full of fighters. I don’t know of a single “comfortable” saint. Christian life was never meant to be a shelter for people looking for an easy, trouble-free existence. The saints are people who understood that God’s grace calls for everything you’ve got.

St. Josemaría reaches for the image of the athlete in this point of The Way to puncture a comfortable, watered-down version of Christianity: “I have noticed at times how an athlete’s eyes light up at the sight of the obstacles he has to overcome. What a victory there is in store! See how he conquers the difficulties! God Our Lord looks at us that way. He loves our struggle: we will win through always, because He will never deny us his all-powerful grace. Thus, it doesn’t matter if we have to fight, because He does not abandon us” (Friends of God, no. 182).

Who owns my time?

In Scripture, the title “man of God” isn’t reserved for religious specialists. It belongs to anyone who has handed over his or her whole life to God. So the real question behind our behavior is simple: where is my life headed? Who owns my time, my mind, my capacity to love?

When we get discouraged and faith starts to feel like routine, it helps to remember that Jesus Himself sometimes describes heaven as a reward: “Your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you” (Mt 6:6).

But God doesn’t reward us the way a business does. He makes us members of his family. The starting point for thinking about the Christian life is that a Christian is, quite literally, a child of God. “Recognize, O Christian, your dignity,” as one Church Father put it in a well-known homily.

That dignity as sons and daughters is the foundation for everything God asks of us, the conduct He expects, the struggle itself. And the “reward” turns out to be God giving Himself to us. A “man of God” runs because he wants to please his Father. He knows his life will be judged before a single spectator: his Father, God. Grades, success, social status all matter, but only in a relative way. What really drives this effort is the Father’s gaze: He is the one who sees in secret and promises a happiness no amount of earthly exhaustion can touch.

Ten months... for a wilted crown

When St. Josemaría uses sports as a spiritual metaphor, he’s not breaking new ground. St. Paul did the same thing centuries earlier, drawing on sport as it was practiced in the Greek and Roman world. It’s interesting to note that Paul, a Jew, could well have looked down on these spectacles. Yet in his day, public games like the Olympics or the Isthmian Games at Corinth represented the height of a citizen’s discipline and formation. An athlete submitted to brutal training: ten months of strict abstinence, rigid diets, exhausting workouts under the sun. All for a prize that barely lasted a few days, a laurel crown that wilted within a week.

Paul, who likely saw this world firsthand in the pagan cities he visited, uses the image of physical effort to call out Christian complacency. If an athlete can master his body for a passing victory, how can we neglect our preparation for eternity? That’s the point he makes in his first letter to the Corinthians: “Do you not know that the runners in the stadium all run in the race, but only one wins the prize? Run so as to win. Every athlete exercises discipline in every way. They do it to win a perishable crown, but we an imperishable one” (1 Cor 9:24-25).

Don’t settle for comfort

St. Paul wasn’t writing from behind a desk. His body carried the scars of his fidelity: “Five times I received forty lashes minus ones. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, and once I spent a night and a day adrift at sea” (2 Cor 11:24-25).

Paul’s beatings and shipwrecks weren’t coincidental travel accidents. They were the hard training of someone determined to stay faithful. He wasn’t chasing suffering for its own sake, but he accepted it as part of what it meant to carry out what the Father asked of him.

We see the same fight against comfort in other saints. St. John Paul II, even as Pope, would slip away now and then to ski in the mountains. For him, skiing wasn’t a luxury. It was a space for effort and prayer. Flying down a snowy slope became a way of talking with God, where the speed and the cold demanded total focus and full control of the body. When people were surprised to see a Pope on skis, he’d joke that it was cheaper than calling another conclave. He understood, plainly, that the spirit needs the open air of physical effort, and that a successor of St. Peter couldn’t afford to get too comfortable.

St. Josemaría taught the same lesson: comfort is the poison that puts the soul to sleep. The daily effort he asks of us isn’t about inventing strange sacrifices and doing harder and harder things. It’s about putting more love into ordinary things, as he explains elsewhere in The Way: 

If you’ve ever trained for a competition, you know how much those little things matter. If you want, you could take a moment now to think about the little things in your personal struggle: the sacrifices the Church asks of you (like fasting for an hour before Communion or abstaining from meat on Fridays in Lent), the ways you know you need to grow in self-discipline to have a closer relationship with God or take care of other people better. 

Let’s look up, too, at a one of the coaches who watches over us on the field. St. Bernard of Clairvaux had a beautiful Latin phrase for Mary’s role in this fight: Ipsa duce, “with her as our general,” or “our guide.” Having Mary as our guide and coach means she sets the pace of the game, gives us strength when we want to quit, and defends us when things get hard. With a mother like that, the crown is within reach: ask her for it.