College Football

I love this time of year! College football is so much fun to watch, and if you're a fan like me, it's great exercise--there's all the jumping and cheering in the stands and the throwing of things if you're watching on TV.

Time for true confessions: I am such a fan that it is hard for me to be a Christian Encourager when I think of my team's dreaded rivals. But in the last few years, I have decided it was time for me to grow up. How can I be a faith-based talk show host one day and be yelling nasty things the next day in the Cotton Bowl? Well, not that I would normally think of nasty things to say, but there's this one part of the fight song that the whole Longhorn nation has adopted that is just not polite language.

So this year, I prayed for the best team to win, for no one on either side to get hurt, and then... the hard prayer... to surrender the game! See, I think I thought that I could will my team to victory if I shouted louder, concentrated more or tensed harder. So many, many times in the dramatic game last Saturday, I prayed, "Lord, I surrender this game to you."

Now that might make me a bad fan to some. Like I was giving up. But it gave me peace. Victory in a football game just can't take precedence over victory in Jesus. I didn't want the rivals or the outcome to have that much control over me.

And you know what? I can't take credit for this, as much as I'd like to, but our team had a surprising upset over the #1 team in the country! And you know what else, the rivals' fans I encountered were nicer to me than I've experienced in years. Maybe God loves people from Oklahoma, too. Ha ha... just joking.

OK, now I'm going to start working on surrendering that Missouri game tomorrow night...