In this video, former Dallas Cowboy, Jonathan Evans, uses an experience from his days in training camp to teach a valuable lesson about starting well so you can finish better.
The entire video is above, and the complete transcript is below.
I know this is hard, but I remember going into training camp with the Dallas Cowboys with Bill Parcells who was a tough coach. One of the first things that he did with us when we went to training camp the first day was he started changing our stance.
You know, DeMarcus Ware, we all came in in the class of 2005. DeMarcus Ware, Jay Ratliff, Marion Barber, Marcus Spears. That was my class that we came into and he was fiddling with our stance.
DeMarcus Ware was in a three-point stance, but because we ran the 3-4 defense at the time he made him get up in a two-point stance. DeMarcus couldn’t stand that at first because he was so used to his stance. Marion Barber had a wide stance when he started out, but Coach Bill Parcells made him come into a narrow stance. And he kept fiddling with my stance and fiddling with everybody’s stance and we couldn’t stand that because we had had our stance set for so long it made us uncomfortable trying to make this team.
Then he finally came in the team meeting room and said, “Guys, I know you’re uncomfortable and I know you don’t like me changing your stance, but let me help you understand something. This ain’t college and this ain’t high school. How you start is how you finish in this league. And I have to change your stance in order for you to compete at the level that you’ve been now called to.”
God is asking a lot of men in this room to change your stance. He’s asking you to change your stance on how you deal with your wife, change your stance on how you relate to your children, change your stance on how you relate to different people on the job, change your stance as it relates to forgiveness and how you lash out with your anger.
There’s different things in the room where God is calling you to change your stance because He knows this is a whole other level of living. It’s called the Kingdom of God. You may have been out in the world, but now I’m calling you to something new and I’m calling you to make bigger plays and how you start will determine how you finish.
