For Wilshire Baptist Church
It’s bowl season for football fans, and I’ll admit that while I’m a football fan, I’m not a big fan of bowl games. That may seem like a disconnect, but unless the bowl is leading toward a national championship, I just don’t find much to get excited about. Bowls are good for school coffers and media exposure, but for me the interest is fleeting.
The main issue I have with bowl games is that I like longstanding rivalries, and many bowl games have no rivalry at all. In lots of cases, you have two teams that have never played each other or have not played very often. There’s no animosity, no revenge factor, no “Remember what happened last year?” to get all whipped up about.
Case in point: I’ll watch Baylor vs. Air Force in the Armed Forces Bowl on TV, but those schools have played each other just three times. The first game was in 1961 and the last was in 1977, my freshman year at Baylor. We’ve won all three games, but there’s no reason to gloat about it this year because the athletes and coaches playing this year weren’t there. None of the players on either team was alive when they last played. Baylor’s head coach was only one year old at that last meeting; Air Force’s was 11.
Still, I’m not totally cold to this year’s game because I have strong ties to both institutions. I was born while my father was serving in the Air Force in Montana, and it’s not a stretch to say my birth was paid for by the Air Force. What’s more, my parents met at Baylor and I was steeped in their collegiate traditions and graduated there myself. So one could say I was born under both the Baylor and Air Force flags. I’ve considered both a gift my entire life.
More lasting than both, however, but in many ways flowing through both, has been the gift of faith my parents gave me. It’s what drew them together at Baylor and what held them together in the Air Force. If they weren’t at the base or at home, they were at the First Southern Baptist Church of Great Falls, not just attending but serving in various ways. When LeAnn and I visited Great Falls three years ago on a vacation to Yellowstone, we stopped by the church. It’s called Big Sky Baptist now, but it’s in the same building where I was taken as an infant and first exposed to the sights and sounds of church and faith.
Faith and patriotism, or more accurately for my father, faith and service – those are two pretty good gifts I’m thinking about this Christmas. They’ve outlasted all other gifts I’ve been given. They are presents that have had lasting presence because they’ve provided direction and context to life.
There’s been a lot of controversy in recent times about the comingling of faith and patriotism, but if you put them on opposite sides of the centrifuge, as it were, you’ll find that “service” spins out in the middle.