Are You a Winner?

              Are You a Winner?
Commitment Sunday/World Communion Sunday
Philippians 3.4b-14 October 3, 1993
One of the features of Newsweek is their Conventional Wisdom column in which they
list the winners and losers of the week. This week the winners are President Clinton,
Hillary Clinton; he for his speech, a combination of FDR, Ronald Regan, and Rube
Goldberg; she for being the Eleanor Roosevelt four times with more hairdos than an
HMO menu. The losers are: doctors who are advised to bag the Lexus and start a car
pool; and Sin — ask not what smoking will do to you, but what cig taxes will do for
the country.
I. There are some people who are winners and there are others who are losers.
A. The winners.
1. Bo knows baseball, Bo knows football. He clinched the division title
for the Sox with a meteoric home run. Bo overcame hip surgery. A
doctor said, "I know what is best for Bo Jakcson's hip, but I don't
know what is best for his life." A Sox fan made up a hat on the front
of which was written Bo Knew. Bo Jackson is a winner.
2. Stephen Hawking is a winner. Possibly the world's best known
scientist Hawking visited Fermi Lab not long ago. He suffers from
Lou Gherig's disease, disabling him so that he can only move a few
facial muscles. None of his theories is likely to be proved during his
lifetime, therefore there is no Nobel Prize. Smiling eager kids in
wheelchairs surround him. "How do you make a legal signature if you
can't write?' Laboriously, he taps out his answers. Here's a famous
scientist, a best-selling author, a Star Trek star—and he's disabled just
like them. He's a winner!
3. These past few weeks have seen another kind of winner. Last week
Katherine Power who after 23 years turned herself in because she could
not bear hiding any longer. She had been among the 60's radicals who
ended up robbing a bank and killing a policeman. Her friends in
Oregon knew her as Alice Metzinger, a chef, a wife, a mother.
4. Dying confession of Gary A. Tucker, a retired bus driver told the FBI
that he participated in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street
Baptist Church on September 15th that killed four black girls. Tucker
placed a case of dynamite at the church before the bombing and set the
detonator to off the following morning, a Sunday. Robert E.
Chambliss and former member of the KKK was the only person
convicted of murder in the bombing.
B. Then there are the losers. If our world has in it winners there must be
losers. Losers never quite make it to their fullest human potential. They
lack direction — they whine their way through life. By the way...the sign.
1. So there are thousands of books, seminars, symposia on subjects
ranging from parenting to investments to make people winners.
Dr. Arthur J. Landwehr Are You a Winner? © 1