7 Days of Super Bowl Stuff – SBXLIV – Day 2 “Crowning a Champion”

This is my latest article on iibloom.com, posted Feb 1, 2010:

The countdown has begun; t-minus 6 days and counting until the big game. Super Bowl XLIV is upon us, one of the biggest spectacles in all of sports and entertainment. The anticipation of the game is on the minds of many sports fans across the country. The anticipation of the commercials, which might be the larger anticipation, is on the minds of television fans and of “people who like parties with lots of food.” In the end, there will be a winning team (the champions) and a losing team. It may be the team you are rooting for, it might not. 50/50. Win: go down in history. Lose: be forgotten.

It’s easy for us to get into the stereotypical (“dumb ox”) mindset when it comes to football…”ugh…me like football, mmm, smash, kill, score, win…ugh.” It’s easy to yell at the television, even though we know they can’t hear us and that the play we’re yelling about is already history. It’s easy to stuff our faces full of greasy food during any given game. It’s easy to become involved, in an unhealthy way, in the fantasy of the game. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing intrinsically evil about football, and in the right context, is perfectly normal and healthy, however, we should guard against a few tendencies that are common in our society.

1. We must realize that football is a game and has no bearing on what our goal in life should be – getting to Heaven.
2. We shouldn’t try to live (vicariously or otherwise) through our favorite football team or all-star players.
3. We should never allow football to take precedence over family time.
4. We should never allow football to take precedence over our responsibilities.
5. We should “consume” football in reasonable, moderate amounts.

Maybe football isn’t your thing, and you could care less about the Super Bowl, or the commercials. That’s fine. Substitute the worldly thing in your life that you enjoy the most for the word football in the five sentences above. (Shopping, Watching movies/television, Going to concerts, etc.)

Reporters often ask coaches what their “game plan” is and if getting to the Superbowl was in the plan from the beginning. What a ridiculous question! Of course it was in their plan, it’s every coach’s plan, and it should always be their plan as long as they’re coaching! No coach, or player, ever goes into a season playing for second-best. The goal is always to win! Liken this to our goals in life. If we go into our season without a game plan, without a set of plays and without the playbook, we’ll easily be defeated. We should go into the game of life with the goal of winning. 

Our “season” is our life. The “game plan” is our daily plan of how we’re going to grow closer to Christ. The “set of plays” are our everyday prayers, actions, choices and the Mass and our “playbook” is Sacred Scripture. If we set a goal of achieving the title of “champion” (a Saint in Heaven), we’re much more likely to be granted that salvation than if we never decide to shoot for anything in life. Set your goal towards God.

Many coaches are constantly telling their players to be humble, play hard and to not underestimate their opponents. They realize that their team isn’t perfect, while at the same time continuing to shoot for perfection. Their positive and optimistic outlook guides their team towards greatness. We should all be shooting for greatness too. God wants our best, given freely to him, in all we do. 

In the little things (hosting a Super Bowl party, being a guest at one, making comments about the plays, the calls or the commercials) during the game (and always), be aware of your words, your actions and your thoughts. A true follower of Christ never makes someone call into question his motivation, his intent or his character. Give God your very best and you’ll be crowned a champion!

Man up!

7 Days of Super Bowl Stuff -SBXLIV- Day 1

Super Bowl XLIV is nearly upon us.  The potentially epic battle between two of the National Football League’s biggest “gunslingers” will commence next Sunday February 7th, and the game proves to be one of the most exciting Super Bowls in recent history.  (It’s unlikely that this year’s game will top last year’s, especially the finish, by my team, the 6-Time World Champion Pittsburgh Steelers!)  Peyton Manning from the Indianapolis Colts and Drew Brees from the New Orleans Saints plan to take their teams to victory, but there can be only one winner.

I hear lots of discussion about these two quarterbacks, who also captain their teams.  On the one hand, you’ve got the likable character of Peyton Manning, the face of the Colts for the past 12 years and a common face in mainstream advertising.  Manning’s intensity and incredible vision on the field make him one of the elite at the position.  He’s been league MVP four times, including this season.  He won the Super Bowl in 2006.  He’s going to be hard to beat.

On the other hand, you’ve got the unlikely story of the New Orleans Saints, and their quarterback Drew Brees.  In 2005, Hurricane Katrina nearly destroyed the Louisiana Superdome, but after a nearly-$200 million dollar renovation, the team made it back to their home and worked their way to an almost perfect season in 2009.  Starting out 13-0 this season, the Saints were highly favored in the NFC to make it to the Super Bowl, and they did just that.  They did it behind the leadership and incredible ability of Brees.  Personally, I think both players are likable men.  I think they show incredible leadership and striking ability on the field.  I don’t have a preferred team in this case, but I’m predicting that Manning and the Colts will end up winning in a high-scoring, (poorly defensed) game.  Colts will win Super Bowl XLIV 38-31.

Ponder this for a moment…

Imagine if, when it came down to eternity, only one “team” was given the prize of salvation.  Only the winning team was awarded everlasting life with God the Father and the losing team, went to hell.  If you were on one of those teams, wouldn’t you put all your heart and soul into doing everything you could to be the winning team?  Well, the fact of the matter is that instead of it being a football game, it’s an actual war.  The battle is taking place, as we speak, for souls.  There is a winning side, and there is a losing side.  The winners receive uncontrollable joy, peace and love with God in Heaven.  The losers receive the exact opposite – the absence of love.  Knowing this, why is it that we allow ourselves to play on the losing team?  We have the ability to play on the winning team and the game has already been played.  Jesus Christ already died on the cross for us, and won us the victory.  You have the choice, today and everyday, to play on Christ’s winning team.  His team is playing for something more important than the Vince Lombardi Trophy.  There’s no time to lose.  Suit up, and play on the winning team today!

Man up!

GUEST BLOGGER: “Two Stories” by Ryan Kraeger

Ryan Kraeger was born in upstate New York, second of seven children, raised on a farm and homeschooled from first grade to highschool. He graduated at seventeen and joined the military the same week, choosing the MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) of Combat Engineer because he thought the video looked cool (it was primarily composed of explosions). Since then he has done many and varied things in the Army, including loading baggage on planes in Fort Hood Texas, spending a year in the Republic of Korea, patrolling and raiding in Iraq, and building bridges and uncovering IED’s in Afghanistan. Currently he is in training to be a Green Beret, learning his target language, Korean, before going on to the world’s finest and most intensive medic course.  Ryan is also an avid reader and amateur writer, you can read more of his writing at his website.

Two Stories:  Stories bump, stories merge, stories permeate each other. Stories can even unite. Only God can keep track of all the stories and how they interact. It is a vast, complex, multi-dimensional web, a tapestry of infinite complexity and beauty. The work of God in each life is not separate from His work in every life. What He does for me, He is doing for everyone else in the world, through me. Whatever He does for anyone else, He does for me, through them, whether we ever meet or not. It is God’s nature to be a union, and it is His nature to bring about union among His creatures, little by little and partially in this world, and then finally and totally in the next world, where all who are in union with Him will be in union with each other.  We get hints of it, even now.

Imagine a young girl, maybe fifteen or sixteen, who is in a bad dating relationship in high school. Her boyfriend is controlling, orverbally abusive, or is pressuring her to have sex or join in with his drug or alcohol habit, or whatever the case may be. She has compromised too much with too many, and isn’t sure how much she has left to give up, or why she’s bothering anymore. She’s not an innocent little girl anymore. She feels tarnished. Her whole life is a scramble to find acceptance, which for her means popularity with the right bunch of teenage girls, and being noticed by the right teenage boys. Her relationship with her parents and siblings has completely unraveled. She is lost, drifting, miserable, empty, and too busy to notice it. All her thought and energy is bent on the one thing that she thinks will keep her head above water, keep her life meaningful and worthwhile, and he isn’t worth the time of day. The preoccupation consumes her, and she doesn’t know what’s wrong, or where she should turn, or what she should do. Now, imagine that one day she is sitting somewhere, perhaps looking out the window of the school bus, or sitting on a park bench, or standing in a group of teenagers on the corner. Purple streaked hair, too much makeup, tight jeans, halter top, book bag and IPod, she looks just like any one of millions of girls her age, but she is not. She is God’s beloved daughter, His Princess, His Darling. I think God sometimes sends parents only one child, as a symbol of how much He loves each one of us, as if I were the only one.

Let’s put our girl on the bus. She’s sitting on her seat, looking out the window, with one hand jealously clutched by the boy who is sitting next to her. She lets him hold her hand, not because she really enjoys it, but just because that is what you do. If you’re in a relationship, you hold hands, you sit on his lap, you argue about how far you are willing to go. That’s just what you do.

Suddenly, through the window, she sees another couple. They are very old, in their sixties or seventies or eighties or something. To her teenage mind they hardly even register as people anymore. They are like museum pieces, totally irrelevant to her world of hard music, slamming lockers, filthy jokes and innuendo, and constant noise, noise, noise, noise. She has passed by this same couple sitting on their porch a hundred times and never seen them, but her King has a gift for her today. He opens her eyes, for a second, an instant, a heartbeat, just long enough. The old man takes the old woman’s hand and smiles at her. The old woman smiles back. All hell screams in fury, as years of lies, deceit, hate, sneering and malice are threatened all in an instant. They rush around, frantically trying to crush the new thoughts and wonderings and vague, painful longings, and they are mostly successful. They are very good at what they do. Before the bus reaches the corner, their rotten construction is standing in all its ugliness once again. God lets it go, because He knows more than they do. Something has been planted deep in her heart, and though she forgets in a minute, anxious not to threaten the card castle she has so carefully built for herself, she can never be the same again. One old man, on an ordinary day, for no particular reason other than that he just felt like it, did what he’d been doing for fifty years. He loved his wife. He never met that teenage girl, but for ever after her heart will be just a little harder to satisfy. She will want just a little more from the man in her life, her standards will be just a little bit higher. It will cause her no end of grief, because the higher your standards, the easier they are to disappoint, but her heart will have moved one fraction closer to realizing the dangerous truth, that she is more precious than this entire planet, and all the galaxies of the universe. Her Prince came to earth and died for her, and so she deserves more. All hell will stand between her and that truth, but because one old man loved his wife, her heart moved a fraction closer to it, and it can never be moved back.

Another Star-of-a-Commercial

Carl’s Jr is at it again, continuing to make smutty commercials. Most of the time when I see a Carl’s Jr commercial, I simply turn the channel. I can see them coming from a mile away, so can you. The latest is terrible. The commercial shows a young male sitting in an auto body shop, watching a crew of workers buff out spray paint on his classic ’60’s Chevelle. The narrator says, “Having three girlfriends is great, until one of them finds out about the other two.” This line is wrong on a number of levels, but highlights the acceptable behavior of a “cultural man”. “Cultural Manliness” is telling even the youngest viewer that “when one of your multiple girlfriends finds out about your other girlfriends, you can just sit around and sneer about it. Just shell out a few extra bucks for a few burgers and laugh as your defiled muscle car gets a rub down to remove the paint from your unstable ex-girlfriend. It’s only a little extra cash.”

The “star” of the commercial sits eating his burger and fries as if nothing happened. He obviously is unscathed from the breakup and could care less about how anyone else feels about what he did.

It’s not okay to date multiple people. That’s not dating, that’s being a swinger. And if a guy’s “just hanging out” with a few women here and there, the women don’t become ravenous and spray paint his car with the words “CHEATER”. Only a (slightly unstable?) woman who thinks her man is committed to her does that. A TrueMan states his intentions clearly to one woman and remains committed and faithful to her. As men, we must demand that other men know what it means to be a man, and then challenge all men around us to act and respond in a manly way.

Man up!

United in Prayer, For Our Haitian Brothers and Sisters

A young man named Cory has created a profound video, lasting just over one minute. The video captures the magnitude of the earthquake disaster in Haiti during the middle of this month, January 2010. As you watch the clip, please pray for our Haitian Brothers and Sisters in their time of need. If you can give financial support, please do.

Tebow in Pro-Life Ad [Pro-Life, Nothing Else Makes Sense]

I saw a Facebook status that mentioned something about Tim Tebow and the Super Bowl ad that he and his mother are going to be featured in on Sunday, February 7th.  The commercial has been funded by Focus on the Family and has an openly pro-life sentiment.  Pam Tebow, when faced with a sickness/disease during pregnancy with Tim (her 5th child), was informed by her doctors to abort the pregnancy for fear of her death, or complications with the baby.  Pam said no, and proceeded with the pregnancy, giving birth to a boy who would grow up and become one of the most recognizable faces in college sports history.

Tebow won the Heisman trophy and a National Championship, and quite arguably, the accomplishments he has made off the field far outweigh his accomplishments on the field.  However, regardless of what he’s done in life, he had the right to life while in the womb!  Pro-Life makes sense, pro-abortion doesn’t.  It simply doesn’t make sense.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find the ad itself, but I have a news conference with Tebow’s response and also one man’s (Larry Murphy, I guess) take on the situation.  (I disagree with the name-calling, but thought some of his quips were justified.)

Please stop calling abortion Pro-Choice.  No one should have the choice to murder.  Call it what it is, Pro-Abortion (Pro-Death).

Man up!

Tuesdays with Daddy – I Just Want to Hold You

I noticed today, that for the most part, my children aren’t interested in being held by me.  It’s not that I scare them, or that I’m too rough, or that my beard is scruffy on their faces, or anything like that.  It’s that they have other stuff they want to be doing.  On occasion, when a head is bonked, or a toe is stubbed, or a toy is stolen by their sibling and just about every 2 hours or so when that hunger thing comes around, then they come running, arms wide open, running to their daddy asking for something in their time of need.

Consequently, I realized, because of my wonderful children, that many of us are that way with our Heavenly Father.  All He wants is for us to be connected with Him, to be united with Him, to love Him and to be with Him.  More often than not, we want the opposite.  We have other “stuff” we want to do, and we don’t include Him.  He’s going to be there waiting for us, the same way I’m always there waiting for my girls, but wouldn’t it be better for us to run to Him in the good times too, when we’re not in need of something from Him?  I challenge all of us, myself included, to give God our first-fruits.  To give to Him the perfect time, upfront, not just the leftovers.

Man up!

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