During my freshmen year of college, I was a part of the football team at the University of Alabama. The head coach was Bill Curry. I learned much from Coach Curry that year. He left at the end of the season, but my brief time with him taught me much about life. I am appreciative to this day for God allowing him to be a part of my life.

As we would prepare for practice each day during that season of 1989, we would have to come into meetings prepared and on time. He required that we have two legal pads with us. One was for football, and the other one, he stated was for life. The latter one is the one that impacted my life so much. It was the one where he required us to write down our goals and to develop roadmaps for achieving them. It was the one where we made notes regarding life lessons that he had learned through the years. It was the one where we learned lessons that would make us into productive, God-fearing, young men — not perfect, as he knew that we would make mistakes, but he tried to help us to minimize them. Yes, I learned much as a freshman football player (and throughout my entire collegiate experience), but his talks about what it took to become a man and to live life after football was very life changing. 

He spoke to the young players quite often about the adjustment to college life. He stated that for some, the lack of playing time and engagement in game day planning was going to be tough for us that fall. He stated that it was important to learn a life lesson through this period of drought and disappointment. He indicated that he knew that there would be frustrations with not being able to play after having stellar high school careers. The natural instinct would be for us to come together and complain about it. It would be easy to come together and complain about the coaches and their lack of awareness of our talent. It would be easy to say that there were “favorites” who got playing time over those of us who were more talented. It would be easy to get together and just complain. He encouraged us to resist the urge to join the ministry of the “Fellowship of the Miserable”. The Fellowship of the Miserable loosely describes the propensity of individuals to congregate and complain based upon common concerns and issues that they are mutually experiencing. These complaints are not dealt with in a positive manner. They are usually situations where the frustration and anger are counterproductive, and it is an environment where blame is assigned to others rather than engaging in self-reflection on how and why you arrived at your current situation. In many ways, it is human nature, but Coach Curry encouraged us to take a higher road. He encouraged us to find strength in one another and to resist the urge to play the blame game. He encouraged us to look inside ourselves, hear what was being said by the coaches about improving ourselves, and develop strategies to move in that direction. It was too easy just to fall into the Fellowship of Miserable. If you embraced that rhetoric, you would not be able to hear what was being said to benefit you in your improvement. You would not be able to move toward improvement.

Proverbs 27:17 tells us to sharpen each other: “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” In Coach Curry’s mind, I am sure that this verse holds true. I cannot recall him using this verse, but it contains the same messaging that he highlights. In aligning ourselves with people who we consider to be close friends, be careful who you select. As a piece of iron works to sharpen a knife and make it more effective in its role (cutting), it is important for us to find people who are going to sharpen us and make us better people…sharper in our lives. We want to find people who are going to help us achieve our best version of ourselves. The Fellowship of the Miserable does not allow that to happen. It is counterproductive to you getting better. You are aligning yourself with people who are only interested in stating the obvious in the situation. They are only interested in blaming others for the situation. These situations do nothing to sharpen the knife. They make the knife more dull.

Please note that there are legitimate times when it is appropriate to complain about issues. There are times when people are treating you and others that you are aligned with unfairly. Please address those accordingly. This is not what this is about. It is about realizing that you do have a locus of control. If you don’t, and you need strength through numbers to make a change, do it. This is about people not taking responsibility for circumstances that they are in in which they have the control to overcome. I hope that that makes sense.

To this day, I continue to think about this lesson from Coach Curry. I try to not to engage with people who embrace negativity. I try not to engage with people who resort to the blame game. Yes, I strive to support, encourage, and embrace all, but if they continue to be content with being a part of the Fellowship of the Miserable, I try to separate myself from them because I don’t want to resort to that thinking and behavior. Is that to say that I am better than those who are part of the “Fellowship of the Miserable”? Does that mean that I have not been a “woe is me” kind of person at some point in my life? Does this mean that I don’t have bad days when I just grope along in my misery and grief? I respond with an emphatic “No” to all of these. There are days when things are tough, but it is important to remember not to get stuck there. It is important to figure out a way out of your rut. For every negative thing that has happened in your life, there are hundreds of positive things that are off-setting to the negatives. Remembering that complaining and griping about it is not going to change anything is the key. Spending time with people who are only going to pull you deeper into this negativity is not worthwhile. Figure out a game plan to make things better. It might not be immediate, but there are options. Don’t allow the Fellowship of the Miserable tell you any differently.