The Freedom to Celebrate
by Royce
“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.” — Philippians 2:3-4
I have to be honest with you. After decades in the marketplace, one thing that is still so hard to do is to congratulate people I was secretly jealous of.
You know the moment. A colleague gets the promotion you were quietly hoping for. A competitor lands the client you spent months pursuing. A peer gets recognized in a room where you felt invisible. And you smile. You walk over. You shake their hand or send the message. Well deserved. So happy for you.
And somewhere underneath that, something tightens.
I used to think this was a personal failing — something to confess and move past. But then I’ve realized how many of us are performing celebration while privately managing a quiet jealousy we don’t know what to do with. We’re not bad people. We’re just running on a scoreboard that was never designed to make genuine celebration possible.
Which is why what I saw at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina stopped me completely. These athletes — competing for the same medals, the same history, the same once in a lifetime moments, kept choosing to celebrate each other with what looked like genuine, unguarded joy. Not performance. Not protocol. Something real.
On February 19, 2026, Alysa Liu did something that stopped the internet.
She had just won gold in women’s figure skating at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics — the first American to win an individual figure skating medal in 24 years. Her first move wasn’t toward her team mates or her coach. She ran across the stage to Ami Nakai — her Japanese competitor, the youngest competitor in this event, seventeen years old — and pulled her into a full embrace. Ami had just won bronze: her first Olympic medal ever. And Alysa, still trying to process her own historic moment, made sure Ami knew that her moment mattered too.
The video went viral within hours. Not because it was strategic. Because it was real.
What made that embrace possible wasn’t just personality or emotional generosity. It was a particular kind of vision — the ability to look beyond the scoreboard and see a person.
Consider what Ami represented in that moment: a younger skater, from a rival nation, who will almost certainly compete against Alysa again. In marketplace terms, Alysa had just won the dream contract, and she immediately celebrated the junior competitor who might one day take her clients. She could do that because her joy wasn’t a finite resource that had to be carefully rationed. She wasn’t afraid that celebrating Ami would cost her anything.
Paul names the alternative clearly: selfish ambition. Not malice but ambition. The same engine that drives so much of marketplace achievement is the very thing that makes genuine celebration of others nearly impossible. When your sense of worth is built on comparative ranking, someone else ascending always feels, quietly, like you descending.
A colleague’s promotion stings. A competitor’s contract win feels like a verdict. Someone else’s public recognition triggers something you don’t always want to name. This is not a character flaw. It is a structural problem. When identity is performance-dependent, the math is always zero-sum — and life shrinks to the size of the court.
But Paul commands something that only makes sense from a completely different foundation. In humility, value others above yourselves. This isn’t professional self-destruction. It’s a description of someone so secure in who they are that they no longer need to protect themselves from other people’s good news.
Alysa didn’t lose anything by celebrating Ami. Her gold didn’t become less gold. Her place in history didn’t shrink. She was simply free — free in a way that many people in marketplace never experience — because the deepest thing true about her in that moment wasn’t her score. It was something that no scoreboard had given her and no scoreboard could take away.
That is what happens when belovedness is given, not earned. When your identity is rooted not in your rank, your revenue, or your recognition — but in being fully known and fully held by God — someone else’s win genuinely stops being a threat. The court becomes just a court again. And life, mercifully, turns out to be much bigger than it.
Personal Reflection
- When you last heard of a colleague’s promotion, a competitor’s new contract, or a peer’s public recognition — what was your honest first reaction? What does that reaction reveal about where your identity is actually anchored?
- Is there someone in your professional world right now whose success you’ve found difficult to celebrate? What would it take — and what would need to be true about your security in Christ — to genuinely run toward them the way Alysa ran toward Ami?
Prayer
Lord, I confess that I often experience other people’s success as a quiet accusation. Forgive me for building my worth on rankings You never asked me to compete in. Teach me what it means to be so rooted in Your love that someone else’s gold doesn’t threaten mine. Free me to celebrate generously — not as a discipline, but as an overflow of knowing who I am in You. Amen.