I heard a statement on the radio that really struck me today. Watching sports and getting emotional about it, as so many of us do, is an excuse to get wildly passionate about something that, in the end, has absolutely no lasting impact or real meaningful importance in our lives.
We get all excited that our team wins, we get teary-eyed at Mariano Rivera’s exit from the game, we get upset that our beloved boys of summer don’t get to play in October.
But it doesn’t matter. You still most likely went to the same job today, have the same family, same interests, same friends.
It also strikes me that sports makes us into barbarians. It’s not enough to love the Red Sox… you have to hate the Yankees. (This is not peculiarly American, some of the most passionate and dangerous sports fans in the world are fans of European soccer.)
I wonder at the violence that this occasionally produces, but I want to focus somewhere else.
I wonder sometimes if we don’t have a fixed amount of passion we get to exercise in our lives. If being intensely passionate about the Redskins would mean that I’d be less interested in the cause of justice in the world, or the cause of Christ in this world, or even the cause of plain old kindness in the day-to-day…
This is an awesome time for USAmerican Sports fans. We still get meaningful baseball for another month, but the football season is well underway… Can we make room to stoke the fires of passion we sometimes feel when we hear about an injustice we want to correct? Or can we be passionate about the worship of our creator?
Or is that energy only reserved for a field filled with young men beating up on each other…
P-Squared 
What I love about all the sports is the fans always saying ” We won.” Or “We had a bad week.” I always want to be like “oh you play professional ball?” To give context – when I go see Rush I’m not going to come home and say “We put on an awesome show.” I’m going to say how great Rush was. Unfortunately, people have been suckered into believing they are a part of something that they’re not a part of. Yeah, you can go to the games, but that doesn’t make you a part of the team anymore than going to a tour of the Gibson factor makes me a master luthier. I say all that to say that if people would get fired up about something that mattered where they have real ownership the world would be a different place. I promise life doesn’t suck if your identity isn’t in trying to be a part of a team that has no interest in you other than getting as much of your money as possible.
Yeah, and the “we/they” mentality spills over into politics and, heaven forbid, even war…
Nice post, although I don’t agree with the premise that we have a fixed amount of passion we get to exercise in our lives. I think that passion can be exercised as often as it is stirred up, so the issue then becomes how can it be fruitfully stirred up?
Good thought, Paul… and how do we make sure we stir up our passion about the best and brightest things, in God’s eyes at least…?
I think it helps if the cause (need) is seeable and feelable, i.e., local or at least somehow related locally, which might just be a flavor of your sports analogy. It’s harder for me to figure out how to get passionate about something as general as “the cause of justice in the world, or the cause of Christ in this world.”
Hello Peter, I will be in the area this weekend and was wondering if we could do Church/lunch my cell # is 267-237-5821 call or txt me. (we spoke a while ago I have the cabin in Lock haven/renovo area and have been following your 2 voice blog/HD500, I am a worship guitar player and would like to see/hear your setup as you have been a great help to me with your presets. quazcha@yahoo.com is my email
– Chuck Britton