“If I had it all to do over again…” Wouldn’t you skip everything that got you to where you are today? I’m not speaking of the exciting but difficult undertakings of being offered a good but demanding job or landing a scholarship that makes being a college student twice as hard. I’m talking about more frustrating instances in your life that yielded some level of resolve and spiritual fortitude.

Skipping the hypothetical in favor of my own anecdotal history, junior high was hard. School bus rides, peer pressure, rejection when the girl you liked marked “no” on the note your wrote her that said, “Be my girlfriend __ Yes __ No.”  You gotta be kidding me if you think I’d do that over again. Or how about my first job at Vons? I’d worked before 1992 but never had taxes taken out of my hard earned pay. And as if that wasn’t enough, it was my first exposure to the cut-throat work environment where you sometimes pull the weight of others who are being paid the same as you. Given the choice to work for pennies while fellow co-workers cheat the system I’d pass on that too. Then again, there was the job I had shortly after college where my boss reprimanded me for personal emails on company time. I had become the guy not pulling his weight and was nearly fired for it. Maybe I’d fix that last item if I could go back in time.

But the majority of hard learned lessons in my life have been and are being formed through unpredictable adversity and myriad alternatives. It’s almost as if the brain, body and spirit we’ve been given thrives on problem solving and the contriteness birthed out of repentance. Urgency and dilemma push us to extremes we’d never visit on our own volition. And for most of us, brutality and recklessness usually take us to places of pain or public correction. Our mistakes usually culminate with some type of embarrassing outcome like the time I spent 5 minutes insulting a teacher who was standing right behind me while my “friends” stood in silence. I learned grace from that teacher as she continued to help me pass her class without waging personal war against the comedic seventh grader. There’s no way I’d go back in time and not skip that moment of indiscretion.

There’s a reason we don’t get do-overs.

He might not know it but my cousin was my idol when I was little. He was eight years my senior and on occasion I got to ride in the car with Billy. Sometimes I got to go to the gym with Billy and shoot on the side courts while my cousin and his buddies got their run in. I was too little to get down with the big cats so I was content to just be in the same area code breathing the same oxygen as my icon.

But you know how it goes on the wood at the open gyms where guys just show up and play. As soon as you walk in you want to know one thing, “Who’s got next?” That’s what we say to try to get on so you can play in the next game. You want next so you don’t waste a trip and if you don’t look like you can go [play] it’s gonna be a long afternoon. If you don’t know somebody in the gym, it’s gonna be a long afternoon.

It’s troublesome when you ‘got next’ because everyone wants to play with you. The pressure mounts incessantly as you wait for the current game to end because guys know you have something they want, a chance to play. But you want to assemble the squad that will give you the best chance of winning and that may not include the dude who keeps bugging you saying, “Hey man, you got your five already?” See, that guy is geared up with his Kobe V shoes on and vintage jersey. You want nothing to do with that guy and yet you’re his target and that of about 30 other guys looking to get on.

I feel like I ‘got next’ right now. In this economy, how selective should I be about work? What kind of team members do I need to help my business succeed? How much can I afford to give away and still be taken seriously enough in my market? The litany of questions drones in my sleep and it all parallels my time back in the old gyms with Billy. The only difference is that this time I am Billy and it’s not a game anymore. I don’t want to win. I have to win. There’s a difference but the rules are the same. Pick up your team because the game going on right now is about to be over. I’m glad to be an entrepreneur but taking the court is a lot more ominous than I ever imagined. Nevertheless, it’s 10:43 p.m. on April 7, 2010 and I got my five and my 6ixth. Check ball…let’s play. You got next?

I don’t know why I was thinking about this on the Saturday before Easter but if it’s on the brain it’s sometimes worth saying. Dangerous rule of thumb. But it’s a 6ixth Man Lesson. I had a few minutes before going to a music rehearsal for a band I’m in and I was thinking about how lonely Jesus or any ostracized criminal would have felt being prepped for the humiliating crucifixion. Then I thought specifically about Jesus and the idea of being convicted, humiliated, sold out and ostracized despite being innocent. Those thoughts led me to think about how resolute we humans can be once our minds are made up to hate someone.

I saw some footage the other day of “Tea Party” movement members protesting President Obama. Relax, this is not about to get political. Anyway, one of the protesters had a stuffed monkey on her shoulder and held a sign that said, “Obama…go back to Kenya.” I know plenty of people who oppose Obama but I don’t think they’d call him a monkey. I’ve always said that when we become racists, we’re allowing indoctrination to betray our intelligence.

Particularly in the United States, we are daily dependent upon interdependence, the ability to work cooperatively. This is often mistaken for adopting the worldviews of others and casting convictions aside but that’s not what I mean. Since I was in fourth grade, I’ve continuously learned that when we dig our heels in to hate people that is not the same as opposing ideology. Surely you’ve looked in the mirror and been angry about something on par with a raving lunatic. At that point you either fueled your own unrelenting fury toward someone or came to the realization that a dichotomy should divide your value based convictions from an outright hate for humans who hold contrary opinions to your own.

It’s checkmate every time I reflect on Jesus’ willingness to die for human atonement. Just the idea alone is uncanny because of how often we choose to fight battles that become brutally personal. I told my wife the other day that, while growing up, I couldn’t wait to be an adult. I was bent on all kinds of revenge. Then I added, “…but I grew up and learned that I wasn’t entitled to such revenge and it broke my heart.” True story, but looking at the cross of Christ is a great anesthesia for the angrily punch drunk world I call home.