Mutts

I heard someone say awhile back that mutts are the healthiest dogs. It may have been on TV or it may have been a conversation I overheard or it may have been something I was in the middle of, not sure. But it stuck in my brain and then something I heard today brought it back to mind.

I was listening to Colin Cowherd on ESPN radio. Yes, it’s one of my favorite (maybe my top favorite) radio shows, and I especially love to have it on in the background when I find myself doing paperwork (detest it) or reading (love it) at my desk on some mornings I am fortunate to not have other duties (today is one of those mornings). No, sorry to disappoint, I don’t listen to NPR (don’t even know where to find it), can’t stand Sean Hannity (voice is too whiny), quit listening to Christian talk radio 3 or so years ago (don’t want the fundamentalist indoctrination any longer), and haven’t really gotten into podcasts yet. I get plenty of news from the reports at the top and bottom of the hour and would do fine if the only station available to me forever was ESPN radio and TV. Maybe that makes me shallow, but I just don’t get much from the talking heads on either side of the fence.

Colin Cowherd brings a bit of a different style to the typical sports talk show. He has a good radio voice that is pleasant to hear, but the thing I like most about his show is the fact that he has a ton of common sense that applies to various sports stories and extends that out to life application much of the time. He has some very good insight.

Today he was discussing where good NFL quarterbacks come from. And you know what, they don’t come from Texas, Oklahoma, USC, Florida, the perrenial powerhouses. I was very curious about this so I actually did a bit of research. Take a look at the following list. Every one of these 40 quarterbacks can be found on most “Top 100″ lists. Most of the top 25 are included in this 40 with a few others who I like or are notable names thrown in for good measure:

1. Troy Aikmen – UCLA
2. Ken Anderson – Augustana College
3. Sammy Baugh – TCU
4. George Blanda – Kentucky
5. Tom Brady – Michigan
6. Terry Bradshaw – Louisiana Tech
7. Daunte Culpepper – Central Florida
8. Len Dawson – Purdue
9. Lynn Dickey – Kansas State
10. John Elway – Stanford
11. Boomer Esiason – Maryland
12. Brett Favre – Southern Mississippi
13. Dan Fouts – Oregon
14. Bob Griese – Purdue
15. Otto Graham – Northwestern
16. Doug Flutie – Boston College
17. Jeff Hostetler – West Virginia
18. Sonny Jurgensen – Duke
19. Jim Kelly – Miami
20. Bobby Layne – Texas
21. Donovan McNabb – Syracuse
22. Steve McNair – Mississippi
23. Jim McMahon – BYU
24. Peyton Manning – Tennessee
25. Dan Marino – Pittsburgh
26. Joe Montana – Notre Dame
27. Warren Moon – Washington
28. Joe Namath – Alabama
29. Jim Plunkett – Stanford
30. Phil Simms – Morehead State
31. Ken Stabler – Alabama
32. Bart Starr – Alabama
33. Roger Staubach – Navy
34. Fran Tarkenton – Georgia
35. Joe Theisman – Notre Dame
36. Y.A. Tittle -  Louisiana State
37. Johnny Unitas – Louisville  
38. Michael Vick – Virginia Tech
39. Kurt Warner – Northern Iowa
40. Steve Young – BYU

Even if you add to the list of Texas, Oklahoma, USC, and Florida a few other traditionally “powerhouse” football schools such as Alabama, Notre Dame, and Michigan, this still means that 34 of these 40 great NFL quaterbacks went to underdog football schools. The point Cowherd was making is that these guys, most of the greats, went to schools where they were in the trenches, where they had to suffer, where they had to work for greatness, where they had to grind through the muck to come out on top. They didn’t go to schools with five star recruits at wide receiver and running back and offensive lineman like the quarterbacks from the big schools usually have. His feeling was that life as a quarterback at those powerhouse schools was a softer life. From Cowherd, “Kurt Warner was bagging groceries while Matt Lienhert was bagging Co-eds.” The mutts who have to fight through the toughest challenges are the strongest in the end.

I have had a theory about sickness. It’s just an observation of mine, not proven scientific fact although I have read some medical literature which supports my theory. The theory is this: the more obssessed an individual is with killing germs in their environment, the sicker they are. It is with regular frequency that I see germ obssessed individuals frequently harboring infectious illness of all sorts. I know people who carry hand sanitzer with them everywhere and use it frequently, flush their sinuses with water nightly, only use “antibacterial soap,” get their kids on antibiotics at the first sign of a sniffle. And they are just more sick more often. I think that being too clean puts you at a disadvantage. Our immune systems are evolved to be tested and through the testing gain strength to protect us down the road. If your immune system goes untested it ends up just like a muscle that goes unused, weak and with little endurance. The mutts who are out in the wildnerness tromping through the dirt and scaveging for food at times are the strongest.

So all this kind of came together this morning while listening to ESPN (and I love that fact by itself, that things came together while filling my brain with more sports). It’s not a brand new epiphany but kind of a repeat epiphany. We only get stronger when we are challenged, when we grind through the muck, when we rise above the suffering, when we find ourselves outside of our comfort zone, when we stretch. The thing that is a bit new about this though for me is that I think this can be expanded to include faith and spirituality too. It’s true for everywhere else in life. It’s true for faith too. If your faith is never challenged, if you never find yourself in the middle of the muck, if you never get outside of institutional and denominational culture and doctrine, if you never find yourself with doubt, your faith will be weak. It will not grow with you. It will be stunted. If you never challenge it, even if you don’t feel you need to challenge it, it will not get stronger. I seriously doubt that faith gets stronger by praying more, by reading the bible more, by trusting more, by singing more songs, by memorizing more verses, by doing more work at church, by following more rules better. It only gets stronger when you or someone else takes out a hammer and starts beating away at it. It only gets stronger when you really challenge it, really doubt it, really wrestle with God like Jacob. And I think that’s what versus like “Work out your own salvation” (Phil 2:12 (one of my personal favorites)), or “Run the race as if to gain the prize” (1 Cor 9:24), or “Don’t build your house on the sand” (Matt 7:26) at least partly are meant to convey. Get out the hammer, get out of the comfort zone, get out a good dose of  doubt, and then go at it. Because in the end, the mutts are the ones who come out stronger and healthier. I want to be a mutt. And sometimes that’s a scary place because it’s dangerous and sometimes the mutts die. But so do the thoroughbreds, and sometimes all it takes for them to die is to step on their foot wrong. I’ll bet in the end that the mutts do better.

Is It Real?

As I was tucking my son, Jack, in bed last night we were talking about growing up and being responsible, being a good big brother, being tough on the football field (that is the consuming thing right now as he is in the heat of 5th grade football), learning about yourself, learning about God. While we were talking, he asked if all the stories in the bible were true, the old stories from people that lived 5,000-6,000 years ago like Adam and Eve and Noah.

All of a sudden I had an epiphany: It doesn’t really matter if they are true or not because that is not the point. The point is that these stories are telling us something about God. Whomever wrote those stories, whether is was Moses or some other dude, had an experience of/with God that they were trying to convey in a certain way. Whether they are real is not the point. The meaning of the experience is the point. What that experience says about God is the point. What that story/experience says about God is where the realness really exists. Why have I gotten so caught up in the historical realness and missed the meaning? Probably because we live in a post-Enlightenment non-mystical world where everything must be proven logically in order to be of value. We have forgotten as a culture that there are other avenues to knowing.

My friend Luke recently reminded me from one of our mutual favorites, The Matrix, how the “desert of the real” may not be what we all along thought it was. Sometimes what is real is something completely else.

Fear-Based Faith…

I’ve been reading The Unlikely Disciple, a book by Kevin Roose who was a student at Brown University but switched to Liberty University for a semester to experience it and then write a book about it. It’s a fascinating book, and thus far I think nails the Christian Evangelical culture down pretty solid, not in an abusive or destructive sense, but in a sense of having a very accurate assessment of what I, someone who has grown up in the thick of it, know it’s problems to be. I will probably post some more on it as I get through it.

This topic of fear of God has been prevalent in my last two posts as a motivator of my faith for much of my life. There is a quote from The Unlikely Disciple that does a very good job of exposing that culture of fear-based faith the dominates the Christian landscape. Roose quotes Jerry Falwell on page 48. This is a statement that Falwell made on September 13, 2001 while appearing on The 700 Club:

“The abortionists have got to bear some burden for [the attacks], because God will not be mocked…And when we destroy forty million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way–all of themwho have tried to secularize America–I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”

How’s that for evangelism and faith based on fear? It is no wonder to me why I got this message and now am having to fight it back when so-called Christian leaders make these kind of statements. No wonder at all.

Where I’m At…

I thought after my last post, I ought to follow it up so that the people who commented and follow along a bit will know where I have landed. July seemed a bit like hell on earth for my little family. I described it to a friend as something akin being thrown into a wood chipper. Didn’t see it coming. Didn’t expect it. But it happened. And now I’m here on the other side feeling like some of the baggage I was dragging around wouldn’t fit through the chipper so I find myself rid of it and feeling like I have a bit of a solid footing from which to catch the next wave (man do I love being out in the waves of the ocean with a surfboard).

So I’ll try to be brief. First off, I think I have gotten past the God question. It really comes down to a basic question that is more philosophical in nature than it is scientific. How did this world get here? There are only two real possibilities. It’s either by chance or it’s not. If it is by chance, then there is no reason to believe in a God. If it is not by chance, and by extension therefore purposeful, then there is great reason to believe in a God/Creator/Format/Etc. Some may inject a third possiblity here, that we were placed here by aliens of some sort, but that really just moves the location of the question because then one asks how the aliens came about. So without laying out a buch of detail as to why right now (I’ll do a bit of that further down), suffice it to say that it seems much more likely that we were created. And that is the point of faith. We all have to choose one direction on this question, and it takes faith to believe in your choice. There is not sufficient proof on either side to rule out the possibility of the other. And that is faith no matter how you look at it. I feel very comfortable with that.

I feel more comfortable believing in our purposeful existence for a handful of reasons, but soon after I came to a comfortable place at this point, I began reading a book called Chi Running in order to work on my running efficiency for my triathlon obsession/passion/dysfunction. Of course, there are introductory words about Tai Chi as a practice, what’s behind it, the history, the theories, the philosophies, and I find it fascinating, so much so that I believe this book will be significantly helpful to me across the breadth of my life actually, not just in running. Principles like centering one’s self really speak to me, especially after coming through the chipper, as I feel like prior to this experience, I was lost with all sorts of centers, none of which were receiving adequate attention. This side of it, I feel lean, and centered.

One of the principles I read about is that involving fundamental truths, universal laws, those things which have universal application at a deep, deep level across the board for the world and humanity. Call it a “format.” My friend John (TitForTat) bases his belief in a God on this format idea, and I think I am not far behind. There are things of this nature all over the place. The Chinese study of movement in Tai Chi. Newton and Einstein’s study of physics. Simple observations in nature such as palm trees not growing well in Kansas and polar bears not doing well in Arizona. When we go along with the order of nature and the universe, when we understand what these deep truths are and move with them instead of against them, we are centered and life goes much better for us as individuals and as a community. All of this order is unlikely to have come about by itself, and to me strongly points to the divine.

But I want to take it a bit of a step further. Danny Dreyer, the author of Chi Running, quotes Cecil B. DeMille on page 31:

“It is impossible for us to break the law ourselves. We can only break ourselves against the law.”

I’m not exactly certain what the circumstances of that statement were. And I think I may have even heard it or read it prior to this book. But I am understanding it in a different way today. Dreyer is using it, of course, to say that when we go against these fundamental truths, we are setting ourselves up against the way that it is best to live. Disharmony. We are making it difficult for ourselves and setting ourselves up for pain and injury and distress.

So the thought came to me that what if we looked at the bible this way in a certain sense. I have always looked at it as a book of rules, hoops to jump through, mistakes not to make. And that has had me looking at God as a cosmic law enforcer practically looking for reasons to strike me down. No wonder I have found myself trying to get out from under that sort of pressure by doubting God’s existence. But what if we look at the bible as the creator of the universe, the dude who knows all the fundamental truths, telling us the way it works best? What if it is God saying, “Hey, I made all this. I know how it works best. I know how to best be in harmony with it. And here it is.” I think maybe this is a much healthier and more centering way to view scripture.