Super Bowl XLII is next week, and, having come from the Midwest, I have to admit I’m still in shock that the NY Giants came onto Green Bay’s frigid arctic tundra last Sunday and beat the Packers. So it’s Patriots vs. Giants, Tom Brady vs. Eli Manning. Should be a great game!
Tom Brady is in the midst of a ten-year, 60-million-dollar contract to win it all for New England. And he’s good at what he does. In fact, he quarterbacks the only NFL team ever to win 18 games in a season, surpassing the 17-0 Dolphins of 1972. Quite a success story. And yet, consider these comments from a recent 60 Minutes interview with Tom Brady:
His all-American image took a hit last year, when actress Bridget Moynihan, his longtime girlfriend, announced she was pregnant with Brady’s son shortly after the couple broke up. Brady supports the child but is now dating a Brazilian supermodel.
He asks, “Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think there’s something greater out there for me? I mean, maybe a lot of people would say, ‘Hey man, this is what is.’ I reached my goal, my dream, my life. Me, I think, ‘God, it’s got to be more than this.’ I mean this isn’t, this can't be what it’s all cracked up to be.”
What's the answer? “I wish I knew. I wish I knew,” says Brady. “I love playing football and I love being quarterback for this team. But at the same time, I think there are a lot of other parts about me that I’m trying to find.”
All of us armchair quarterbacks, and anyone who wants to make it big—get rich and famous—would do well to listen to Brady’s remarkably frank admission how he got to the top, became the best of the best, and in the end found it unsatisfying. Why is that? Because he was made for a kind of joy and thrill so much more grand than any athletic success or bank balance can bring. He was, and you were also, made for the incalculable soul-satisfaction of praising, thanking, and trusting in the Lord God, celebrating his forgiving love poured out in Christ. Pray that Tom Brady finds the One he’s searching for!
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
The Luong Children
News surfaced the other day that the body of two-year-old Hannah Luong had been recovered in Louisiana 120 miles downstream from the Alabama bridge where she was thrown to her death on January 8. The bodies of her siblings, Ryan, Lindsey and Danny, had already been found washed ashore in Alabama and Mississippi—they had died in the same dreadful, unfathomable way: their father had flung them into the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway as an act of revenge against his wife.
So the bodies have been found, and this sad episode can now drift off into oblivion as other breaking news stories take center stage. I figured, then, it was time to toss the copies of articles about the Luong children I had printed, but when I went to the recycle bin I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t throw away the memory of these four small children; it just seemed wrong to erase their lives from my attention. So I kept these sad reports of young lives and stunning madness.
A human life is a human life—by which I mean each person is a creation of the Living God, fashioned by the divine hand and formed in the very image of the Lord (Ps 139:13; Gen 1:27). Even if the pace of emerging news is fast and furious, and even if the Luong children are now but a distant memory from the front page, their lives remain in front of us. In Dostoyevsky’s novel, Crime and Punishment, the reader is confronted with the weighty truth that a human life is a thing of substance and meaning and eternal significance, and it cannot just be snuffed out and obliterated. People made in God’s image are larger than this life, larger than death.
The tragic demise of the four Luong children can help us look up from crazy-busy lives and consider the pain and chaos in so many lives around us. No doubt, for every high-profile news story of unspeakable crimes, there are scores of children sobbing into their pillow at night, scores of husbands and wives not talking to each other, scores of addicts with lifestyles spinning out of control. These less newsworthy stories of quiet desperation are a fact of life, and if the sorrowful Luong saga can help awaken us to the existence of broken homes and domestic pain all around us, there can be a benefit in that.
As a follower of Christ, I can gain by allowing grievous events to really sink into my thick head and dull heart; I can let them stimulate me to pray for my neighbors and reach out in love, in Christ’s love, to show that someone cares. Who knows when our simple acts of concern for people on our pathway will break through, by the touch of God, and prevent a life made by and loved by the Lord from turning down a dark and hopeless path? Ask the Lord to take evil, even this brazen and heinous sin, and turn it for good in the larger work of his kingdom (Gen 50:20).
So the bodies have been found, and this sad episode can now drift off into oblivion as other breaking news stories take center stage. I figured, then, it was time to toss the copies of articles about the Luong children I had printed, but when I went to the recycle bin I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t throw away the memory of these four small children; it just seemed wrong to erase their lives from my attention. So I kept these sad reports of young lives and stunning madness.
A human life is a human life—by which I mean each person is a creation of the Living God, fashioned by the divine hand and formed in the very image of the Lord (Ps 139:13; Gen 1:27). Even if the pace of emerging news is fast and furious, and even if the Luong children are now but a distant memory from the front page, their lives remain in front of us. In Dostoyevsky’s novel, Crime and Punishment, the reader is confronted with the weighty truth that a human life is a thing of substance and meaning and eternal significance, and it cannot just be snuffed out and obliterated. People made in God’s image are larger than this life, larger than death.
The tragic demise of the four Luong children can help us look up from crazy-busy lives and consider the pain and chaos in so many lives around us. No doubt, for every high-profile news story of unspeakable crimes, there are scores of children sobbing into their pillow at night, scores of husbands and wives not talking to each other, scores of addicts with lifestyles spinning out of control. These less newsworthy stories of quiet desperation are a fact of life, and if the sorrowful Luong saga can help awaken us to the existence of broken homes and domestic pain all around us, there can be a benefit in that.
As a follower of Christ, I can gain by allowing grievous events to really sink into my thick head and dull heart; I can let them stimulate me to pray for my neighbors and reach out in love, in Christ’s love, to show that someone cares. Who knows when our simple acts of concern for people on our pathway will break through, by the touch of God, and prevent a life made by and loved by the Lord from turning down a dark and hopeless path? Ask the Lord to take evil, even this brazen and heinous sin, and turn it for good in the larger work of his kingdom (Gen 50:20).
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