It's 11:14 PM on Superbowl Sunday; I'm sitting on the couch typing on this computer while all the pretty sports analysts attempt to make some sense out of what just happened. The invincible, unbeaten (and by most accounts, unbeatable) New England Patriots just lost the Superbowl to the wildcard New York Giants. The Giants should have lost this game - they were younger, less experienced, and generally less consistent than the Pats - but with a perfect season on the line, the New England Patriots simply got punched in the mouth over and over again. It was quite simply the most important football game of my life, not because of the historical implications but because John Dalelio was a Giants fan.
Last October, my father-in-law passed away unexpectedly. He was in great health, working out with a personal trainer three times a week, had just received a glowing physical, and was enjoying retirement. But as much as we'd like our existence to make sense, to follow some sort of karmic "order" of good things happening to good people, sometimes crap happens and there is no sense to be made of it. You can only try to accept that we have little control over a lot of things and to then do the best we can with the time we have. He was a big man with a truly big heart, and his passing has left a big hole in our lives. We continue to grieve, to laugh, and to remember, but there have been a lot of days in which we have had difficulty accepting that despite our best efforts, sometimes bad things happen. We have faced new kinds of doubt in our faith, and we have found ourselves wishing, hoping, and praying for some kind of sign to let us know that all is still well (even though we wish for faith that didn't need such a thing).
And that's why this game is the most important game I've ever seen. John Dalelio grew up in Boston, but because the New England games were usually blacked out, he grew up a Giants fan. He rejoiced with them; he suffered with them; he screamed profanities at the television (but only on select occasions when they deserved it). And though it didn't make sense for them to do so, they won this game tonight. And if you saw that last drive by the Giants, when Eli Manning somehow broke free of at least three Patriot defenders and threw the ball forty yards down field to David Tyree who caught the ball behind his head by pressing it AGAINST HIS HELMET, you know it was a miracle.
Now, I'm hesitant to go down this road. I think sometimes we (read: I) can put too much emphasis on sporting events to offer us "signs" just as we sometimes rely too much on our circumstances to offer us some indication of our "standing" with the forces we can't see. We can pray, asking God to help our team win while there are just as many people on the other side praying for our team to lose. And then there's the fact that people are starving, abused, and oppressed all around us and we're asking God to sway the outcome of a sporting event that exists largely for our entertainment.
But I will go down this road. In October, the Thursday after the funeral, Boston College came back from a 14-point deficit in TWO MINUTES to beat Virginia Tech. And we hoped it was a sign. But this felt different, and whether it was right or wrong to do so, we all put a lot of hope and faith on the outcome of a football game, something we had no control over. And I do believe it was a sign to encourage our family in a time of grief.
Now, I'm no theologian; there's probably a lot of guys who know more about these kinds of things than I. And I'm not going to suggest that God altered the outcome of a game just for us (though he is kind of known for making pretty extreme gestures to show his love for folks). What I feel from this is that all is still well because his plan is moving right along as he thought it would. We did not see my father-in-law's death coming, but if I believe God to be all-knowing, then I believe he did. And if he knows all, and if I can bring myself to accept the scriptures that assure me that he has a plan for all humanity and that his plan is perfect, then I can be assured that while I'm not in control of much of anything, he still has a firm grip on the future of everything. And in this perfect plan, he knew that he could remind us of this through this silly football game and that we would hear him because we were looking for him in it.
Does God care about the outcome of a football game? I don't know. I think God cares about restoring us - of speaking through scripture as well as things in our culture to tell us the truth about who he is, and through that, to transform us. And I love that he seems to want us to know the truth of who we are so badly that he's willing to use anything around us to get us to hear that message.
I don't think you can say that the Giants won the Superbowl because Jana's father died and he really liked them. I don't think you can say that somehow one team is favored in God's eyes more than another. But I think you can say that sometimes God can use something like a football game to answer the prayers of some folks who really needed to be assured that though we have experienced loss, all was not lost.
There is still hope.
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