One of Life’s Great Mysteries

A wide receiver points to the sky after catching a touchdown pass (or Tebows); a basketball player makes the sign of the cross before taking a free throw; a baseball player gives glory to God for helping his team win the World Series.

I always wonder if this places a burden on God.  How does he establish a priority of answering prayers?  Should he favor one player over another or one team over another?

Let’s say that a player who makes the sign of the cross before taking a free throw is not a particularly good person.  Should God allow him to make that shot?  What if a player on the other team is a much better person?  Should God make the shooter miss?

And how do we explain a 90% free throw shooter that inexplicably misses two free throws at a crucial time in the game. Is God warning that player (the Ebenezer Scrooge effect) that there are more serious paybacks to come if he doesn’t change?

And do players from religious schools have more clout with God?  When UConn plays Notre Dame, do they miss more free throws than when they play a public university?

These are theological questions; but they have sports implications for a sports-obsessed nation.

And when Tebow loses, does he feel abandoned by God?  Or does he believe that if he perseveres God will answer him positively.

Of course we’ll never know, because only God has the big picture.

The Past has Passed

I don’t have a Facebook account; but I am on LinkedIn and Twitter.  It seems to me that Facebook “opens the book” on privacy more than I’m ready to accept.  At least for now.  I do think it’s fascinating that never before could you connect with people in your long ago past like today.  This is especially true if you no longer live where you grew up.

Before the advent of this technology, people who lived in your childhood were dead, for all intents and purposes.  But you could resurrect them at anytime: They still live in your mind exactly as you knew them. The guys on the corner are still there, still seventeen years old, still smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes.  And the girls are still “orbiting” the corner and stopping to entice their boyfriends to go with them. And they never grew old like you.

There’s something sacred about those memories.  If you ride the time machine of technology, you run the risk of “sapping” the romance out of your childhood just to satisfy your curiosity.

But is it worth it? Do you really want to know the truth, a truth that will be neither glorious nor terrible and will show that they acquiesced, like you, to the forces that trampled our dreams and left us on the giant tracks of routine lives?

I don’t.