If you like this post, you can read the rest of my Distractions!
There are a lot of reasons why people get into sports. For me I think it was because my dad was into sports and it was something that would bond us together over the years.
Growing up, my dad would take me to a basketball game or a football game at his alma mater, which is probably the reason that when I grew up I ended up choosing Oregon State University as my school of choice. I didn’t really have another good reason, except that Corvallis, Oregon is a beautiful town and somehow had a lot more going on than the school where my parents met (which I also visited, a 3 block town).
Other than that, I don’t really have a great reason for being as into sports as I am. I’m not terribly athletic, I was a mediocre high school tennis player and that was about it.
These days, playing sports is a bit harder on my body and playing organized sports is a bit more difficult, my church doesn’t even have a softball team. I think we’d do better with a football team anyway, we have a bunch of former college linemen that would scare me to death if they weren’t saved.
So why do sports still thrill me and millions of others? It probably has something to do with wanting something to root for that isn’t scripted and seeing people overcome obstacles against the odds. We all think of ourselves as the underdog.
The great difficulty is that there aren’t too many sports that are worth watching that take less than two hours to watch and sometimes up to three or four (for just one game!) and then there’s the hours of sports talk television and radio programming and sports articles online.
At least with playing sports you can get some physical exercise that help your overall health (if you don’t mangled in the process), but watching them seems to be a bit more difficult to justify if there are bigger priorities to be worked on.
Do sports distract you from your relationship from God?
