Don’t know if you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, but let me say this about it: it may be the single greatest argument ever for the sovereignty of God. If you want a shortcut to what I mean, just read the last chapter, where Gladwell describes his own life experience. He’s not a God guy that I can tell, so he attributes things to right-place-at-the-right-time explanations, but layer in what you know about the God of Scripture, and you’ll be blown away (unless you spend lots of time thinking about this stuff already).

Or you can do this: Start watching the Winter Olympics.

If these Olympics are teaching me anything, it’s that the best you can do is give yourself a chance. The rest is, as some still dare to say, “up to God.”

Apolo Ohno, his sport’s most decorated Olympian, rejoices in a silver medal. Why? Because short track speed skating, for all its premium on speed and agility, awards survivors as much as winners. If you can remain on your feet throughout a lightning fast series of dizzying ovals amidst competitive traffic, you’ll likely walk away with medal. How did Ohno get his silver? The two Korean skaters immediately ahead of Ohno and ready to shut him out collided and slid into the wall with less than 30 yards to go.

In the men’s downhill competition, the results were the closest in history, with gold medalist Didier Defago of Switzerland finishing seven-hundredths of a second ahead of Aksel Lund Svindal of Norway and another two hundredths of a second ahead of America’s Bode Miller. Had they been racing together, the spread among the three, over more than two miles at an average exceeding 60 mph, would have been less than 10 feet!

And then, if you can stand it, watch snowboard cross (SBX), where steps and banks and jumps and slush and ice and multiple riders jostling one another serve up the ultimate in go-figure competition. When American Seth Wescott stormed from far behind to repeat as gold medalist, analyst Pat Parnell tried his best to sort out the luck from the bootstraps, saying, “In a sport where the one thing you can count on is absolutely nothing, Seth Wescott controls his moment of Olympic gold.” Wescott’s margin of victory? Less than a boardlength.

Of course, that’s leaving out the greatest of our pain, the accounting of Lindsey Jacobellis, a victim of her own hotdogging in 2006 and now a victim of SBX’s furious fates. Jacobellis missed a gate in her semifinal, disqualifying her from even a finals chance at earning the gold this time around. If it took four years to get to that pain, how many years will it take to soothe it?

Perhaps the reason we remain glued to the Olympics despite their multitudinous commercial interruptions is because they are so much like life, so much like the sun that shines and the rain that falls on the evil and the good. Maybe we are not meant to see God in the moment, but to look for Him there. Maybe the whole point of life’s unpredictability—and let’s say it: its sometimes unjust unpredictability—is not to teach us something but to train us to do something else. Maybe the thrills of victory and the agonies of defeat are not meant to explain to us what God is doing, but to ask of us, those with guts wrenched and hearts bruised, how willing we are to hang with the God who takes us through so many ups and downs.

For when the margin between victory and vanity can be as thin as the sharpened edge of a skater’s blade, if we don’t have God, we are as good as dead. We will burst with pride or rage against futility. Then we have lost not just the game, but forfeited our only shot at true joy, the comfort we have in Christ.