I felt quite convicted recently after an interview with Shirl James Hoffman, author of Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports for an article I’m writing about sports addiction. Although I wrote a paper on the topic last spring for seminary, talking to Hoffman really made me think about how much time I’ve wasted watching games, particularly baseball.
I’m far from a fanatic. But I made a practice of setting the DVR to watch the St. Louis Cardinals. Often at night I would start viewing about an hour into it so I could skip the commercials. Sometimes I wouldn’t watch until the next day or two, only viewing certain segments. If the team lost, I wouldn’t watch at all.
Still, the hours added up. The seven or eight hours a week I might have devoted to watching a telecast could have been better spent on a variety of activities such as reading, playing tennis or praying.
What really made sense to me was Hoffman’s observation that sports have no eternal value. People gather for a few hours to wildly cheer for men interacting with a ball. There is no vested interest. We aren’t friends with these millionaire entertainers. They don’t care about us. For the viewer, there really is no take-away investment in spending time in this pursuit.
So I resolved to give up watching baseball, and to throw myself into more important tasks. It helped that my team collapsed at the same time I made my decision.
It bothers me that sports seem to consume the daily thoughts of so many Christian men, including some in my own family. If such passion and devotion could be directed toward the Lord, what a difference it would make.
My wife argued that perhaps I should forgo other forms of entertainment, such as the movies we watch on TV many nights. I agree that many movies, especially ones produced these days, are a waste of two hours. But the classic films we watch usually are full of lessons about morality, greed and life in general that are worth the time spent.
My quest to ignore sports won’t be easy. After a lifetime of conditioning to watch on TV, it will be easy to get sucked back into the habit.
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