Saturday evening my stepson gathered with his father and friends and they drafted their teams for fantasy football. Yesterday evening I spent a few minutes thinking about the team I'd want to have. I'm listening to Pandora in hopes of hearing again the advertisement with the code for the free entry into the fantasy football league I'd like to play. All over this country people will be spending a few minutes to full-time hours and more going over stats and projections and injury reports as they decide who to play, who to trade and who to bench week to week on their fantasy teams. Some people do it for fun. Some do it for the love of the game and competition with friends/bragging rights. Some people do it for money, as in enough money to live on money. But what it's all about is control, or the illusion of it.
It started simply enough. Fans who love certain players would be able to rate and rank those players against their buddies who love different players. My favorite quarterback could outperform yours even if he didn't have the best offensive line in the history of the game protecting him. Well my favorite wide receiver never drops a pass. So teams were made up of different players from all different teams and their stats are used to determine performance. It gives the illusion. If I could put together a team with these and those players I'd be unstoppable. See the stats even show it. But it's fantasy. It's not real. And any sense of accomplishment and control is an illusion. The stats are bogus. It's not going to be the same as if that team was built to see how a player performs with his real team. You didn't have to hire a coaching staff. You get all the benefits of the players that aren't on your team protecting your quarterback and catching his passes. I could go on.
Now don't get me wrong. I love football, and there is nothing wrong with playing fantasy football. It's a nice little additive to make a weekend of football even more exciting and give you the opportunity to be in a position to give your best friend a friendly hard time without having to trash his team too much. But some folks take it far too seriously and seem to lose sight of two things. One it's not real. They call it fantasy for a reason. Two, football is not that important. It's a game. And while the fall would be far less exciting, we would all survive just fine if it disappeared tomorrow. That goes for all sports. We would be in far more trouble if the farmers and the truckers and the teachers were taken by aliens than we would be in the event that science fiction took our sports professionals.
It's ok to enjoy sports and fantasy football, but let's keep it in perspective. And let's do the same with our lives. I decided several things yesterday. I decided to stop at my best friend's father's hospital room on my way out of town and spend a few minutes with them. I decided to drive 2 more hours south to make my wife happy and hopefully at the same time bring in a little more future income buy picking up a poodle. I decided to buy a Houston Texans T-shirt while I was in that area, because I love the Houston Texans and the shirts get cheaper closer to Houston. I decided what I was going to drink and eat and a few other things, like the music I listened to while driving.
Making those decisions can give me the idea that my choices gave me control of my day and my life, or the "need" to make decisions makes my life feel more important. Illusions on the same level as fantasy football illusions. My big choices were not as much mine as I might like to think. They all stem from two choices made years ago. One to submit to the plays that my coach, the Holy Spirit, calls, and two to do what I could to love, care for and bring joy to the treasure who made a choice to say yes to my proposal of marriage. And those other choices, aren't really all that important. Would it have really made any difference in the eternal scheme of things it I had bought a different T-shirt or none at all? And let's be honest here and admit that I got my wife's opinion on the shirt anyway.
What I'm taking too long to say is that choices and decisions matter, and we are called to use our minds with purpose. We have every right to make choices and to take pleasure from them and their results. But only one choice really matters. Only one choice is about control. Only one is life or death. What will say when God calls us to come to Him and let Him be Lord and call the plays in our life? Every other decision, regardless of how we responded to that one is fantasy. Our eternity has been settled and life or death will win. It's not a game. It's eternally real. God is calling. Let us respond with "I am yours. Here I am Lord, send me."
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