The Race is not for the Swift

I was raised on a steady diet of sports as a kid.  My parents--my mom a swimmer, and my dad a runner--were keen to make sure they raised their children in an active lifestyle, and so I grew up playing basketball and soccer around the clock.

When the World Cup came to the United States in 1994, I had already been playing recreational soccer for a year or two, but I absolutely fell in love with the sport.  I started playing on club teams, and I eventually dropped basketball in order to play soccer year-round.  With the exception of my high school years when marching band overlapped with soccer, I played soccer in some form or fashion from the time I was learning cursive to the time I was preparing to graduate seminary.  I no longer play, but this year I began coaching a local U-12 boys team as a way of paying forward everything the sport has given me: fitness, motivation, self-esteem, friends, and most of all, a great deal of fun.

So it was a sucker punch in the gut to read this story from the Oregonian about a man who was walking a soccer ball from his hometown of Seattle to Brazil in time for next year's World Cup as a means of raising awareness, publicity, and funds for One World Futbol, an organization dedicated to making durable soccer balls for Third World children who might not have a proper field to play on--and where a regular soccer ball might puncture and become useless, or where (more likely) they may not have had access to a proper soccer ball to begin with.

This man--Richard Swanson--had journeyed through my hometown of Longview just the previous week--the local paper even did a profile on him--before heading into Oregon down the 101 highway, where he was tragically struck and killed by the driver of a pickup truck (who, it must be noted, did everything right after the incident: staying at the scene, cooperating fully with police, etc).

So it was saddening to read this for two reasons--because this happened so close to home and because this happened in the service of a cause I believe in (see also: my link on the blog to Grassroot Soccer, an organization dedicated to fighting the spread of HIV).

I get why some people scoff at sports--that they are like the gladiator fights of yore in ancient Rome, designed to distract the masses from how lousy their lives are.  And we spend far too much money on sports today, especially at the college level where many student-athletes are exploited for four years of eligibility by athletic departments and an NCAA that doesn't actually care about their education.  And sports fans are sometimes real jackasses (like the racist fans seemingly endemic to European soccer these days).

But if you think that sports don't have meaning, look again at the confidence and fitness that literally millions of kids have built as a result of playing sports.  Look again at how sports can bring people together across almost any other barrier--some of my greatest joys from my mission to Africa in 2006 were in playing soccer with the children of a Soweto-area slum.  Or, just look again at a video like this.

Much like church itself, sports can be used for both good and bad by us.  And death in the service of the ideal good in either arena is something to mourn.  When I read of Mr. Swanson's death--and of how he died--the verse from Ecclesiastes immediately came to mind: the race is not for the swift, nor battle for the strong...for time and chance happens to them all.

The race is not necessarily ours to run.  But a call to service means that we run it anyways.  Despite the risk.  Despite the risk of time and chance happening to us as well.

But it is, in the end, a risk that must be taken.

Yours in Christ,
Eric