If you would indulge me, I would like to take a moment for a bit of serious reflection on the impact of the events that conspired in Miami yesterday as it relates to my life.
This winter I feel like I’ve had a better time with seasonal depression. Both in terms of its felt presence / intensity, and in managing what is there in the face of what I feel has been an abnormally stressful winter.
I feel like this is due to three main things:
1. More prayer in general, reading / praying psalms, and working diligently to praise / worship God more, and finding some more people who want to do that in the ways that I do.
2. Being very busy. Lauren and I are very busy with work and school, and we’ve had some type of house-related thing going on constantly for the last month or so.
3. Bears going to the superbowl.
It is an odd thing to realize that some of your happiness in life is derived from the success of a regional athletic team. I somewhat realized that when they bowed out of the playoffs last year, but much more so in this year.
I think that part of what some people don’t get about sports movie is the transcendence of a sporting event beyond just the athleticism being displayed on the field of play. People begin to grasp onto hope, and each other, in a shared experience of hoping together. That somehow you can believe that beyond just the bragging rights, that if your historic team that you grew up watching and loving can somehow come from behind the odds to win it will in some way be like reaching out and grabbing ahold of everything you ever wanted and dreamed of. And the bad things will fade away, at least for a little while.
Friends become good friends from sharing this joy and taking this hope together and having a faith to believe in it, to believe in something besides themselves with someone else. Acquaintances become friends and strangers become acquaintances from this shared moment.
Too much stock in a sports team? Maybe, and definitely if we let it take the place of God in our lives.
But don’t we do this with all kinds of fallible stuff in life? Friends in general. We place our false hopes that they will be perfect friends.
We get into churches this way. We begin to think that their game-plan is somehow morally superior to other churches, and we can take our faith in what we hope for and misplace it in the church instead of in God. I can be like that about the Vineyard, especially when talking to my parents.
The Church, like the Superbowl, I think has a limit to a ceiling of joy it can obtain from normal human means. In the end, even if the Bears won the superbowl, the shared joy in experiencing that with friends tops out somewhere (somewhere much below good sex even!). Likewise, no matter what we do in the church in this world, we still die, and leaders and fellow church members fail us. Even in the greatest and biggest churches. And if we go to any of these things, having faith that they are the vessel of our happiness and community we mistake God for things we have made…idols of sorts.
But on the flip side, nothing feels better, deep down in a great way, than sharing real moments with people. Friends sitting around discussing life and relationships. Connecting with people in an effort to help others experience God in a greater way.
I know that if I can deal with my workaholic busyness in a good way, and if I can keep pressing into God with others in prayer and worship, that the seasonal depression is going to factor much less in this winter. But my trick now is to re-engage more people outside of the common interest of the Bears so that we can do great and wonderful life-giving things together, and to actively invite new people to participate in that with me. I think that could more than replace my love of football and the shared experience of watching it with people. And that will be one of my goals with the prayer stuff we’re starting to move forward in now.