Rich Dixon is looking for the heart.

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I love baseball – one of my fondest teenage memories was a trip to see Mickey Mantle and my beloved Yankees in old Yankee Stadium.

Recently I listened as a manager analyzed a struggling player. “He’s too focused on results.”

Wait. He’s a big-league ballplayer, paid handsomely to perform. How can focusing on results be a bad thing?

Turns out, results-focused athletes take shortcuts and develop bad habits. They stop doing the things that made them successful in the first place.

In sports, the best way to succeed is to focus relentlessly on proper principles and great habits. Do those, and results follow.

It’s one of the struggles on a mission-centered bike tour. Everyone begins with great intentions – sacrifice, service, servant leadership, building community. But then things get hard. People get hot and tired and cranky.

We begin chasing short-term results – personal comfort, reaching the destination – at the expense of the long-term principles that made the whole thing worthwhile.

I’m thinking this all relates to Jon’s conversations last week about stuff and more stuff. If I understand correctly, the stuff isn’t the problem.

The problem is a short-term, results-focused attitude. It’s behaving as though the stuff is what matters. And I have a sense that “stuff,” in this context, can be more than material possessions. It might be anything – comfort, power, control – that makes me falsely believe I’m in the center, at the front of the line.

Jesus claimed his kingdom was about long-term principles involving service and sacrifice and being last in line.

When you’re hot and tired, when the pressure to perform is great, when the lure of more seems so tempting, Jesus says,

“For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self?”