No One Wins Alone

In February 1980, coach Herb Brooks led a group of college hockey players onto the ice at Lake Placid to face the Soviet Union, a team that had dominated international hockey for nearly two decades. The Americans had no business being there. They were young, unproven, and outmatched on paper by every measurable standard.

But Brooks had spent months forging something the Soviets did not expect. He cut players with superior individual talent in favor of those who played for each other. He famously told his team, "The name on the front of the jersey is a lot more important than the one on the back." He was not building a roster. He was building a family.

When Mike Eruzione scored the go-ahead goal and Al Michaels asked an entire nation if they believed in miracles, what the world witnessed was not the triumph of individual greatness. It was the power of twenty young men who had learned to carry one another.

The apostle Paul understood this long before hockey existed. "The body does not consist of one member but of many," he wrote to the Corinthians. No eye can say to the hand, "I have no need of you."

The church was never meant to be a collection of solo performers. It was designed to be a team — bound together, sacrificing for one another, each member essential. When we play for the name on the front, the Most High does things through us that none of us could do alone.