Introduction
This article is a little bit different than most — rather than a thorough Bible exposition, it is more of a personal testimony. It is the testimony of me and my father, both looking back at my experience in youth sports. Your experience may have been different to mine — but this story is offered in the hope that it might encourage you to look within and to continue to devote your time and energy to God’s household. Thus, as you read through these words, may our God bless both you and my father and me as we together seek to serve Him in sincerity.
The father, Gordon’s, thoughts:
Until the day I’m called to the judgment, an August evening in 1987 will stand out as the most memorable day of my life. I had looked forward to being a father for so long and now my dream was coming true. In the days, months, and years that followed I found that being a parent lived up to everything I had imagined it would. I also discovered that my burning desire to be a good father and do the right thing for my child would unfortunately take a wrong turn.
One thing I had always planned for my children was to give them the best opportunities in life that I could possibly provide. Now that my son was here I was even more passionate about giving him every opportunity to have a successful life. Of course I planned to share the Bible with him and pray with him, but in addition I wanted to buy him the best educational toys and enroll him in as many growth-producing activities as I could afford. I was intent on giving him a wonderful spiritual background just as my family had given me, but I also longed to ensure that he had many other positive experiences that I felt I had missed by being born into a poor family.
In the back of my mind there was one thing that seemed to me to be crucial to achieving this goal: I needed to give Jason the chance to experience as many organized sports activities as possible. My obsession with exposing my boy to the world of organized sports really came to life when I signed him up for a youth soccer league when he was five years old. While I was thrilled with his uniform, organized practices and the excitement of the weekly game, he was bored by everything about it.
But my fixation on providing Jason with athletic opportunities didn’t stop with soccer. Next it was Little League baseball. When he wasn’t interested in that either, I decided it must be because I hadn’t found the right sport yet. So I enrolled him in basketball, karate, tennis, ice skating, and skiing. To give myself the opportunity to share with him in this “wonderful experience,” I coached baseball, refereed soccer, and learned to ski.
At the time my “logic” in doing this seemed to me to make a lot of sense. But then several things occurred that began to change my mind. First of all I was shocked by the “win at all costs” attitude of many of the other parents. Next I discovered that the other children were often discouraging to the players who weren’t as good. Finally, I was appalled when I realized that some parents were not above cheating to help their child’s team win.
Eventually I realized that what I had attempted to do with the best of motives was actually not good for Jason or for me. I had very good intentions to help my son, but I was trying to do it on my terms instead of God’s. I slowly realized that what I really needed to do for Jason, to help him be the person God wanted him to be, was to surround him with spiritual things, not sports. But the biggest revelation came when I finally woke up to the fact that I had been trying to live my own life through my child. He didn’t care about any of the sports nearly as much as I did. Looking back now I can truthfully say that missing out on all those sports experiences would not have made any difference in his life at all. What had begun as a dream to give my son what I didn’t have had turned into a disappointment instead.
One reason I had this dream for my son was because I had convinced myself that being involved in sports would teach him many valuable lessons, have a good influence on him, and make him a better person. But my mistake was in thinking that he needed something beyond what God could give him. Sports could teach him some things that were positive, but they couldn’t come close to what was available to Jason by being involved in ecclesial activities. When I finally figured this out, a Christadelphian Boy’s Club and CYC replaced the teams he had been on. Instead of wearing a sports uniform, he had a T-shirt that said “Under Construction: Future Man of God”. That’s what I really wanted him to be all along — a man of God, not an athlete.
Now that I was able to see what was really crucial in helping my child become the kind of man I had wanted him to be, I made getting Jason involved in ecclesial activities my focus. Where I had once planned my Saturdays around soccer games, I now looked forward to the Christadelphian Boy’s Club, even though it meant an hour and a half drive to get there. Instead of friends from school spending the night, my wife and I set up sleepovers with boys his age from nearby ecclesias. In place of the crack of the bat against a baseball, there was the rustling of pages in a Bible. These were the experiences that could change a life in a way organized sports never could!
From these good times centered on God, Jason learned all the things I hoped he would learn from sports, and much more. Looking back it seems so odd that I didn’t realize sooner that giving my child the best meant putting God in his life as much as possible. When we do that to the level that we really should, there probably won’t be much time left for sports. If we expose our children to every ecclesial opportunity available, especially if we live in an area with multiple ecclesias within driving range, we will be hard pressed to keep up with all the items on our schedule even without sports.
When young parents are as motivated as I was to give their child the best they can offer, it’s easy to get caught up in what turns out in reality to be the world’s ideas of what’s important, not God’s. Sports are fun and that’s all they should be. I’ve learned that God doesn’t care if we’re athletic or not. He wants us to be godly, not fast or powerful or agile. He wants the same thing for our children. And when it comes down to it, isn’t that what we really want, too?
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One