Over the past few years I’ve changed from being a news junkie to being a sports junkie. I used to have a television news channel on all day when at home. I would have a news channel on the radio while in my truck. Even while working, Fox News so I could be advised when something happened. This eventually wore me down. The news was never good. The good guys never won. After a while, it was no longer possible to tell the good guys from the bad guys.
In my new sports junkie world, I am more likely to have one of the ESPN channels on the television and a sports channel on the radio. One of the programs I listen to each day ends with this tag line: “May the good guys and the bad guys both get exactly what they deserve.” That seems right. What’s great about it is that I get to decide who the good guys and the bad guys are. There isn’t some vague morality line that separates the two. The good guys are the teams that I support. The bad guys are everyone else.
I am somewhat able to keep up the fantasy that in the sports world outcomes are based on what is deserved. If you play hard and do your best, you win. Otherwise you lose. I realize that this like the news world is an illusion. Winners and losers are sometimes determined by who can pay the most or by what an official had for lunch that day, or a lucky bounce of the ball, but at least the illusion is maintainable and when it breaks down, it’s just a game. If my team loses, it’s not that they suddenly became bad guys, it was “the breaks.”
While I have sports radio on most of the day, I do follow other things. I keep up with family and friends on Facebook. I follow my favorite Christian writers and speakers on Twitter. I try to keep a communication line open to God so I can be guided in what I do.
I know one day, probably pretty soon, God will step in separate the wrong from the right, the good from the bad. In the meantime, I will keep up with things that entertain me, that I care about, or that I have some chance of changing. For now that’s sports, friends and family, church, and what God says. Not, of course, in that order. It seems to be working for me.
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