Coping With Loss

Well that was a pretty pitiful sports weekend. The Rangers had the worst World Series collapse in history. The Cowboys-who knows how they ended up. I turned it off at 21-0. In fact, I turned off two very important games for two very important teams to me mid-way through the games. That's a first. But it just hurt too much to keep watching.

That's the word that I think best describes all of the bad feelings that came along with that horrible weekend of sports: hurt. There's anger, sure, and embarrassment and shock and denial, all that stuff. But hurt seems to be the most prevalent feeling and emotion.

Hurt because I watched just about every Rangers game since early August; and I kept up with every Rangers game that I didn't get to watch, all season long. I put lots of time and energy into going to games and keeping tabs on Rangers' news and happenings. The Rangers players became sort of like family, as I knew what was happening to them and saw them virtually everyday. Of course, all of this goes back for almost thirty years. I have been a fan of every Rangers team for as long as I can remember.

All the while, I have dreamed of a championship. Dreamed but never really expected it to happen. Then there it was. We had it. It was ours. It was so much ours that Twitter-land and Facebook-land and, for that matter, all of internet-land had already proclaimed the World Series trophy to be ours. Then it wasn't. Then it was again, one inning later. Then it wasn't. Then it really wasn't in the 11th inning.

Sure, there was a Game 7. But after the collapse of Game 6, we never really had a chance. That's why I had to turn it off in the fifth inning of Game 7. Just couldn't bear to watch it anymore. Why? I guess it hurt too much.

So what do you do now? After a season of being so close, so attuned to everything that happened with a sports team. After being so stinkin' close to a championship that it was basically already ours only to have it stolen away at the last possible second? Many people, it has been reported, have given up. Not only on the Rangers but all of sports. And that is totally understandable and really doesn't seem like all that bad of an idea. Because this hurt is too deep, too painful.

But for me, I have to keep on keeping on. A wise man once told me that the pain of losing is a far greater feeling/emotion than the joy of winning. That was told to me after watching the Braves fall apart and lose a playoff game and a playoff series at the same time. The Braves have become my adopted NL team. And it hurt at the time, when they lost. But this . . . this Rangers collapse is just ridiculous. And that wise man is right: the pain of losing, especially this way, must be a feeling that is much stronger than what I would feel if Nellie would have made that catch in the 9th inning . . . or if Feldman could have just gotten one more strike in the 10th. The joy of winning it all would have been great. But this pain from the collapse is a much more intense feeling.

I have to keep on keeping on because sports really is the ultimate reality show. Sports mirrors life in so many ways. And now I understand that it can really help us cope with life in ways that are really profound. That's because this is life. Things go good, things go bad. Just when it seems that something incredibly good might happen, it's snatched right away from us . . . and vice versa.

There are other lessons to learn from this season, too. For many people, myself most definitely included, they invested too much of themselves in the Rangers. Sports is good-but I need to balance my love for it and passion for it. It needs to be kept in check. That's tough when your team is having such a good year. And there's nothing wrong with rooting for them and getting behind them. But it needs to be kept in balance. If that doesn't happen, your life can be completely shaken when your team seems to fail you. Sports teams are made up of people, doing their best (or at least we hope they are)--nothing more, nothing less. Sports is supposed to be entertainment. When taken too seriously, sports becomes something that it shouldn't be.

So, we move on. I'm already wondering what will happen for next year: Will we keep C.J.? (I hope not.) Will we sign C.C.? We move on because . . . well because that's really all we can do, no matter how much it hurts.

So I'm at Starbucks and there's a girl rambling at the counter . . .

about how excited she is that she just made a 102 on her history test. She goes on and on about herself and how happy she is. Great, I guess. She then describes that she is going to go home and take a nap. Then she is going to do some reading . . .

I knew exactly what she was going to say. Not because I'm a genius or something, though I might be. But I have heard this conversation play out time and time again, every since I, too, was in college. She is trying to "find herself." This is something I did in college and something that all college students do. The lie that our culture (modern, postmodern, or whatever the heck you want to call it) presents is that we will go off to college, find ourselves there, then live out the rest of our lives in a cozy job out of this system that we found ourselves in in college.

College can be a great time to "find ourselves." But if that is the last time that we attempt to put a marker on who we are, what we believe -- our system -- then what a boring, dull life we have ahead of us. I think our culture lies, or at least it has lied to me, when it leads us to believe that we will be able to lead a good life, an enjoyable life, once we live out of a sense of having found ourselves. I don't think we will ever completely find ourselves, just as we will never completely find God. God is, as Elizabeth Johnson terms it, "divine incomprehensibility." There's a sense that we ourselves are incomprehensible, too. We need to use things like psychology to help us gain a sense of who we are. But God's good story teaches us that God, not humans, are the main characters in life.

"Observe how the lillies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin."

Accountability

Are we not accountable for what we do or say?

Michelle Bachman recently said that if we turn Herman Cain's tax plan ("999") upside-down, we see that "the devil is in the details" (making the numbers read "666). That's a ridiculous thing to say. For one, it's incredibly mean. For another, it's horrible biblical exegesis, something that has passed as okay for years. The numbers "666" meant something to a people two thousand years ago, as used in the biblical book of Revelation. It's high time we stop using those numbers to label things that we don't like. That's serious stuff, using biblical metaphors to label things that we don't like. I think the Bible talks about using itself for our own ends as being, well, not a very good thing to do.

The Dallas Cowboys are referred to as "America's Team." The reality is they have not done anything for fifteen years. They are living off their reputation and past years of glory. They are currently a bad football team that is constantly given the national spotlight. That's unfair for the other teams in the NFL, particularly the good ones.

What is missing in each of these examples? Accountability. Bachman should have to answer for saying something stupid like this. The Cowboys should have to answer for poor performance, something beyond just firing head coach after head coach. But neither will have to. That's unfortunate.

As humans, we try to pass the buck, too. Apparently, it's always been that way. Just take a look at the third book of the Bible, where we see that in Adam and Eve, where we get a unique glimpse at our own stories, that the human impulse is to blame others and to not stand up and represent our own actions and decisions.

As followers of Christ, may we be a people who take seriously the call to live our lives as representatives of Christ. It's not a call to be perfect. It's a call to do the best we can. Included in that is the responsibility to stand by our words and our deeds, even when we mess up. If we want the world around us to be accountable, we must first emulate it in our own lives.

First Entry

Last night, I watched the first half of a documentary about Steve Bartman, the guy who supposedly kept the curse alive on the Chicago Cubs by interfering with a foul ball in Game 6 of the 2003 National League Championship Series. I had no idea the guy took such a beating from the public. I mean, I knew he was made fun of and received threats. But the people at that game acted like little children.

It's easy to sit back and watch them and think, "Those idiots." But I was an idiot, too. I'm sure I made fun of him at the time. The issue here is letting things like sports take us completely out of who we are. Sports are fun. Sports can be entertaining. But we have to keep things in balance. When we pour all of who we are into something like sports, we're finished. We're completely at the control of a random sports team to tell us how we should feel. When we step back and think about it, we see how silly this really is.

This is the same thing that the guy who wrote the book, God and Football, was trying to say a couple of years ago with this survey of how people react to SEC football. Sports is sports. What matters is how we react.