God and football

The moment before you dive into the fray of a high school football game, knowing you will be tackled, you feel like lightning is ripping through your guts. Having about as much interest in football as a house cat has in the crabs at the bottom of the sea, I didn’t know this by myself. I learned it from my friend Nick.

When I went to football games in high school—two, if I remember correctly—I busied myself by observing the insects that circled the lights above the field. The subject of football exceeded my social depth and I felt that an attempt to understand would leave me like the cat in the simile: exposed, soggy, hair backcombed, disgruntled, and mewling. This all owed to one thing: I had rhythm in all the wrong places.

Every group at a football game has its own rhythm. The marching band, having rhythm in their fingers and ears, sit in the first bleacher rows and pipe infectious ditties out of their horns. Cheerleaders, having rhythm in their arms and legs, stand at the field’s edge and build themselves into sleek pyramids of glossy limbs. Football players, having rhythm in their mitochondria and sinews, charge again and again against their sweating opponents, gut-lightning and all.

I had none of these. Instead, I had the quiet mental rhythm of the writer—utterly private, brooding, interested mainly by the bugs around the lights and other things that were beside the point. But I was separated from the football game by an extra, significant degree. I knew Jesus. The debauchery of my peers frightened and distanced me. I prayed for them for years. And I waited so long I thought God would never answer me.

I met Nick in college. Both public-schooled, we had each chosen an institution swarmed with homeschoolers—about 80 percent at the time. Among that illustrious crowd you could find every stripe of orthodox Christianity and probably several students who spoke fluent Tolkien Elvish. But you were hard-pressed to find someone like Nick who had been seared by the once-universal high school football game. Nick, a naturally popular California native, was one who marched to the beat of his own sinews and mitochondria. And like many others who found a four-year home at Patrick Henry College, he had learned to tell his life story with honesty. Despite Nick’s failings, his brother Max (who taught him everything he knows) showed him by example how to love Jesus. “What better thing is there to say,” asked Nick, “than how God has redeemed your life?”

It took me going to college in Virginia to finally get the inside scoop on football, and I would have paid a hundred dollars to hear Nick’s story. It meant one thing to me, and I rejoiced: God works in ways I cannot see. He is even saving the football game. I don’t know why I’m surprised. Isn’t He saving me?