God and Football

If you would, participate in this little exercise: raise your hand (or pretend to raise your hand).

I'm going to ask you some questions.  If your answer is "Yes" then keep your hand up, and if your answer is "No" then put it down.

1. Are you a college football fan?  (You clicked to read this, so I'm guessing your answer is Yes.)
2. Do you own any team paraphernalia?  (shirts, hats...)
3. Do you "follow" your team? (read about them, listen to/watch/attend games.)
4. Has the outcome of a game ever affected your worship the next day at church? (My hand's still up too.)

This intersection of faith and football is what led Chad Gibbs to write his book God and Football: Faith and Fanaticism in the SEC.     

While writing this book, Chad traveled to each SEC campus to attend a game, meet with other Christians there, and see how, and if, they balanced their fandom with their faith in Christ.  What followed was an amazing story, one that taught him, and his readers, a lot about how people went about obtaining this lofty goal.

So how did they do it?  As is the nature of people, he found differing opinions on this.

The Time-Loggers

These are the people that attempted to "cancel out" their football obsession time with "God" time.  If they spend 8 hours a week crazily following their team, they would counteract that by spending 8 hours a week with God.  

While spending time with God is always a great thing, there is a problem with this mindset.  God's not looking for us to apply some formula when it comes to following Him. 

The Football-Prayers

These are the ones that instead of separating time between football and God, they combine it by praying for their teams.  What a great idea!  They either pray for their team to be injury-free, to play to the best of their abilities (underhanded way of praying for a win), or they actually pray for their team to win.  

I don't disagree with all of this.  I do believe that God wants us to talk with Him about what's on our minds, but I have to question the motivation for the prayer.  Is it to really talk with God, or is to justify our obsession with football?

Bottom line, God doesn't want us to conjure up some crazy scheme to balance our non-God stuff with our God stuff (even though I don't really believe in the word "secular" because God's involved in everything... another post for a later day, maybe?).  He doesn't want us to follow a formula, or pray just to feel better about how much time we spend not praying.  And lastly, he doesn't want us to feel guilty about liking things such as football.

I truly believe that we serve a loving God, one that loves us enough to give us things here on Earth that we can enjoy, such as sports.  And I believe that He wants us to have a relationship with Him.  He just doesn't want the creation to become more important than the Creator.

Even though I read this book months ago, the message it brought is still fresh on my mind.  I would highly recommend that everyone read this.  But by all means, please do not do a Google image search for "God and football."