Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

When she saw that he had left his cloak in her hand and had run out of the house, she called her household servants. “Look,” she said to them, “this Hebrew has been brought to us to make sport of us! He came in here to sleep with me, but I screamed. When he heard me scream for help, he left his cloak beside me and ran out of the house.”
She kept his cloak beside her until his master came home. Then she told him this story: “That Hebrew slave you brought us came to me to make sport of me. But as soon as I screamed for help, he left his cloak beside me and ran out of the house.”

• Genesis 39:13-18

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.

• 2 Timothy 4:7

With the title of this post, I will soon be losing my man card.  No one in my hometown will speak to me.  People in Pittsburgh will think that I am crazy.  Most of them think more about the Steelers than they think of God.

But that being a very disturbing thing to say, I say this only in the eternal sense of things.  I wrote the title into my planning spreadsheet during Father’s Day weekend.    The Spring Football league, presently called the UFL, was having their championship.  As always or at least as long as I can remember, the U. S. Open golf championship was being played, this year at Oakmont, about as far northeast of Pittsburgh as I live southwest of Pittsburgh.  There was a rain delay on Sunday.  I went outside and looked north and east, light clouds, but on the television the clouds to the south of the course were black and producing some electricity.  Yeah, that far away to have sunny skies overhead and nothing looking like a storm anywhere.  But back to the sports, there were hockey games (Stanley Cup finals), basketball games (NBA championship finals), and women’s basketball, and always someone is played soccer somewhere in the world.  And baseball games.

It was the weekend and I needed some rest.  But with all those championships and the College baseball World Series starting in a day or two, would I remember who any of the victors were when I die and go to Heaven?  God answers our questions.  Yes.  But we will be looking into the eyes of Jesus, and I do not think sports will be on the radar in our minds, ever.

My Dad went off to college to play baseball and football.  He wanted to be an engineer like his big brother, but the war in Europe was brewing, and he decided to drop out after one semester and marry my mother.  They had two children, but probably by the time my brother was born, he was in England, getting ready for D-Day.  He had worked the railroad while he was mentally preparing to go to war and the Army recognized that.  He was transferred the day before D-Day to run the railroad behind the lines to help supply the troops on the front lines.  That did not keep him from being trapped behind enemy lines during the Battle of the Bulge.  But when he was at Fort Polk in Louisiana, before being deployed across the pond, he played baseball for the fort’s team, playing with and against a few big leaguers.

He was a lifelong sports nut.  He required me to play Little League baseball and Pony league.  As the pitchers speed increased, I could not hit the ball.  I got frustrated.  Nobody noticed my speed and instincts in the outfield.  They noticed me striking out at the plate.  So, I quit at about fifteen.  It might have been the same year when I quit playing middle school football.  I was the strikeout champion in baseball, but that meant I played.  In football, I rode the bench.  Others were getting broken bones and pulled muscles.  I got splinters.  Don’t even get me started on basketball.  I ran the mile in track, but then I found that one of my worst allergies was clover and our high school’s conference only had three or four legitimate tracks in the conference, and they lined the track border with clover that bloomed during track season.  Flirt the four-minute mile one week and then run three or four laps of the mile the next week, collapsing due to the lack of oxygen.

But I was like my Dad.  I loved to watch sports.  I pictured Heaven being an unending sports season, playing sports with Hall of Famers and playing golf with Jesus.  But as I have written recently, there is no crying or pain in Heaven and in all sports, someone has to lose.

I do not think that my often-asked question in decades past will ever come into a conversation in Heaven.  “Hey, Jesus, did my alma mater in college ever win a football championship of any kind?  They were contenders when I first enrolled there, but they’ve never sniffed it since.”  Nope, I doubt if that would come up in conversation.

I heard a pastor answer the question that is on a lot of people’s minds, “Will my pet be with me in Heaven?”  He said that he doubted it, although there would be animals in Heaven.  Jesus returns to earth riding a horse.  But the person asking the question does not understand Heaven well.  When we get there, we will want to look into the eyes of Jesus.  If we have any need for comfort, we will turn to Jesus, not a comforting substitute (a pet).

And the same is true about sports.  In the NIV, sport is used as a word meaning fondling a person of the opposite sex, more so in the KJV.  And Paul was using fighting the fight and winning the race as a metaphor since fighting and racing were most, if not all, of the events in the ancient Olympics (current events in those days).

So, what brought this thing up is that I have not seen programs on the “Mother Ship” according to Dan Patrick in a long time.  And then I had the TV on when their pregame show was on a sister network.  The analysts were so passionate about something that did not matter, a game four of a seven game series.  And yes, these people talk more about gambling than they do about the actual game, but their passionate pleas as they looked into the camera made my stomach turn.

I turned to the golf match as it began and they went thirty minutes avoiding a word about the signature hazard at Oakmont – Oakmont is one huge hazard, but architecturally, the church pews are distinctive in all of golf, regardless of the course.  Thirteen ribbons of heavy rough in a huge sand hazard.  And the hazard separates two holes going in opposite directions.  Do not hit the ball on those holes to the left.  But no, in their introductions, they “worshipped” golf.  They “worshipped” the golf course.  But then when players were punished by the church pews, they finally mentioned them.

There was controversy, but the winner hit so many long putts in the final holes, someone who had never won a major and winning his first in his thirties.  Yeah, a feel-good story.  He even praised God.  So did the winning quarterback from the UFL championship the night before.  Like I said, I needed some rest and those sports were less offensive than what was on the other channels.

That is what I remember of the sports-filled Father’s Day weekend.  My son called me two days in a row, first time in over a month for even one of the calls, and winners were praising Jesus.

Otherwise, sports are not important when looking at eternity.  We can take nothing with us except our love of Jesus.  Why load ourselves down before then?

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.