The first maxim this year is to keep your own score. We have a free throw contest throughout the week, and players are to report their score each day to a coach to record. As is the case every year for our elementary camp, sportsmanship and adherence to a code of ethics when competing can be a struggle. For especially the free throw contest, we had emphasize for players to keep their own score for two reasons - their reported scores often ballooned to mathematically impossible proportions, and they loved to argue with each other about how many they thought the person next to them had actually made.
I mention this lesson here because I think it's a hard one for just about everybody. We tend to be really, really interested in what everybody else's score is. When I hand back an exam or major paper grade, I don't have them all passed back before students are comparing what they have. Adults compare salaries and achievements, constantly wondering where they stack up next to the people they know around them. She makes how much? Are you serious? Or perhaps, Why am I getting yelled at? You should see the job he does. Or maybe even, How did she win that? Or the far more comforting, if that's where he's at, I must be doing just fine.
We want to know our friends' scores as well to make sure we're keeping up. Are we doing as much "good"? For our family? For the world? For our health? Are we putting as much into retirement accounts? Are we as well-informed? How does our car compare to the others in the neighborhood?
I'm perhaps guiltiest when it comes to knowing the score of what other people do with their kids. I don't want mine to "fall behind" (that sounds so stupid and embarrassing as I type it, but I know that's the phrase I use in my head). Looking at how other people raise their kids and holding myself to that measure is one more way I've found to fire up the guilt-machine as a parent. Do my kids know enough? Have I provided them enough opportunities? How do they compare in their reading level? Or interest? Or drawing ability? Or willingness to sit still in church? Do their friends know more-do more-socialize more than they do?
Folly. All of it. To keep anyone else's score (or anybody else's kid's score) is pointless. It doesn't matter. And as the elementary campers proved, it's probably a made-up score anyway.
Also, when you're keeping track of someone else's score, you're not all that focused on your own. Your own begins to balloon in your own mind, when in reality it's far less than even you realize. With no accurate picture of where you actually are (as a writer, in your relationship with God, with your exercise plan, etc.), you really can't expect progress. And if you don't want progress, why are you keeping score anyway?
If it's important to you, the score matters. Keep it. Record it. Hold yourself accountable. Find ways to bring that score up in whatever it is you want to do. But don't worry about anybody else's. Unlike a free throw contest, your life's work is not a competition with anybody but who you were yesterday.
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