Competition Is Not a Dirty Word

Not for Thoroughbred Horses. Not for Thoroughbred Women.

Somewhere along the way, Christian women were handed a message that competition was unspiritual. That ambition was pride in disguise. That the desire to win — to excel, to achieve, to push to the edge of your God-given capacity — was something to be managed, subdued, and ideally repented of.

I’ve come to believe without explanation that message is wrong. After reviewing scripture, theological heavyweights, competitive athletes who give their talent to God and give him the glory along with one of my favorite movies, “Chariots of Fire” put all of this in a much different light.

What “Chariots of Fire” and Eric Liddell’s Story Actually Said

In Chariots of Fire, Olympic runner Eric Liddell — a devout Christian and missionary — says something that should be printed on the wall of every church in the country:

“I believe God made me for a purpose. But He also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.” — Eric Liddell, Chariots of Fire

Read that carefully. He does not say, “When I win, I feel His pleasure.” He says when I run. The pleasure of God is located not in the outcome but in the full expression of design.

This is the theology of competition that Thoroughbred Women have been waiting for. Not competition as ego. Not competition as self-promotion. Competition as an act of consecration — the full deployment of God-given capacity, offered back to the One who gave it, regardless of the outcome.

What the Apostle Paul Said About Competition

The Apostle Paul used athletic competition as a positive metaphor repeatedly — and he was never embarrassed by it.

“Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes goes into strict training — they do it to get a crown that will last forever.”  — 1 Corinthians 9:24-25

“I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”  — Philippians 3:14

“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”  — 2 Timothy 4:7

Paul was intensely smart and competitive by any honest reading. He ran hard. He debated with passion.  He pressed on. He fought. He was resilient. He finished. But notice what he is never doing in any of these passages — he is never measuring himself against another runner. He is always running toward something. Toward the prize. Toward the calling. Toward the finish line.

Paul’s competition was entirely forward-facing.

Two Kinds of Competition

C.S. Lewis helps us understand why competition has gotten such a bad reputation in the church — and why the reputation is only partly deserved.

Lewis identified pride as the great sin — the one beneath all others. And he noted that pride is essentially competitive by nature. It gets no pleasure from having something. Only from having more of it than the next person. This kind of competition is not oriented forward toward the finish line. It is oriented sideways toward the other runners. And it is corrosive.

But Lewis is not condemning competition itself. He is diagnosing its corruption. There is a profound difference between:

• The drive to run your best race, reach your full capacity, and achieve something worthy of the gifts you’ve been given — and
• The drive to make sure she runs slower than you.

The first is forward-facing. It is oriented toward potential, toward calling, toward excellence. The second is sideways-facing. It is consumed not with the finish line but with the other runners.

Thoroughbred Women are built for the first. The second is not their design — it is what happens when their design has been corrupted by insecurity, unhealed wounding, or a community that gave them no legitimate lane to run in.

I saw this frequently when I served in the Colorado legislature.  Politics is corrosive in and of itself, but rather than run good bills that actually would help the citizens of the state – I’d see people looking at the headline-grabbing legislation and then race to see if they could outdo their colleague.  Or, I’d have a woman ask me, “I want to be on the leadership team – put me on the team” and when I’d say it would take weekends, summer and extra hours to fundraise and walk for other candidates to help them win – then it was crickets.

The Race Intelligence Question

There is something else worth naming — because not every glance at the field is about comparison. Some of it is race intelligence.

A closer like Thoroughbred champion Zenyatta — one of the greatest racehorses in history — ran from dead last in virtually every race. She wasn’t looking back in panic. She was reading the field with precision. Knowing exactly where everyone was so she could time her surge perfectly. That is not sideways competition. That is strategic awareness. The Thoroughbred Woman who reads the room, tracks the field, and times her move accordingly is not being driven by comparison. She is operating in her design.

The diagnostic question is not “Are you watching the other runners?” It is “What are you doing with what you see?”

• If seeing her succeed makes you want to run harder — that is healthy competition.
• If seeing her succeed makes you want to pull her back — that is something else entirely.

The Single Diagnostic Question

When you feel your competitive drive activating — ask one question and get really honest about your answer:

Am I looking at the finish line, or am I looking at the other runners?

If the answer is the finish line — run. Run hard. Run with everything you have. That is your design expressing itself exactly as God intended.

If the answer is the other runners — pause. Not because competition is wrong. But because you have left your race and entered someone else’s. And you cannot win a race you were never designed to run.

What This Means for You

A Thoroughbred Woman who is running in her lane — forward-facing, fully engaged, grounded in who she is and what she was made for — does not need to diminish her competitive drive. She needs to direct it.

She competes freely because she has nothing to prove. She is not running to establish her worth. She already knows her worth. She is running because she was made to run — and running well is an act of worship, not self-assertion.

Thoroughbred champion Secretariat’s greatest performances were not run against the other horses. His trainer noted that Secretariat ran against himself — against his own potential. The other horses were largely irrelevant to what he was doing. He was running his race.

A Thoroughbred doesn’t watch the other horses. She runs her race.

That is not the absence of competition. That is competition at its highest and most consecrated expression.

“Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.”  — Hebrews 12:1-2

Amy Stephens
Author, Thoroughbred Woman