Sports attendance, sports betting, and sports talk represent one of the most dominant realities on the American scene.
It’s all sports all the time.
Right?
To quote a popular sports adage, “Numbers never lie.”
Let’s add together the most recent regular season total attendance figures of America’s four major professional sports leagues:
Major League Baseball (the unchallenged leader) 70,747,000 fans
National Hockey League (a surprise 2nd place) 22,873,000 fans
National Basketball Association (and declining) 22,538,000 fans
National Football League (highest avg. per game) 18,911,000 fans
The grand total of 135 million-plus includes a generous number of repeaters – the millions of fans who attend multiple games (like season ticket holders), and/or cross over to attend events featuring any of the other three sports (think for instance of fans in the Boston area who in the space of a year might pay to see the Celtics, Bruins, Red Sox, and Patriots).
Here’s the eye-opener: According to the Gallup organization, 135 million is less than the total number of Americans who will attend a worship service, Bible class, mission venture, or small spiritual gathering of some sort during one average week in the United States.
Professional sports may dominate water cooler conversations, require local media outlets to dispatch entire news teams to other cities, and prompt governors to make goofy bets with each other.
But the real story is the quiet, ongoing involvement of a huge slice of our population in some kind of faith-based community.
Is the outcome of a particular game a matter of life and death? It only feels that way when the kicker on your favorite team is lining up to attempt a winning field goal.
Curing cancer; eradicating poverty; conquering racism; ending sex trafficking; eliminating contagious diseases; restoring marriages; foiling terrorist threats; preventing suicides; educating young girls all over the world; welcoming God’s grace. These are real matters of life and death.
Sports are a blast. But all too often they are just a distraction from things that really make a difference.
So does that mean that God ignores the fervent prayers of millions of fans during the last seconds of a big game?
We can be sure that God is hanging onto every word of our prayers. In a way we can never fully comprehend, at least in this world, God is not on one team’s “side” – even though players who point to heaven after scoring a touchdown seem to express a hope that he might be.
Let’s put it this way: If the quarterback of the team playing my Indianapolis Colts somehow ends up eating a sketchy bowl of clam chowder the night before he takes the field, I wouldn’t say that was an answer to prayer.
But then again, you never know.
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