God is a Football Coach

As many of you know by following my previous writings and rants, I am an athletic trainer.  This means I spend 99.9999% of my life with football.  My best friend is a football coach and so I have recently been spending alot of time around football coaches.  He lives about 7 hrs away in the Panhandle of Oklahoma and a couple weeks ago I drove up there to visit him and interview with the Head Athletic Trainer there.  Pretty much my whole weekend was spent around football coaches and mainly him and the secondary coach that works directly under him.  This guy is pretty cool and definitely stole a piece of my heart when he asked me if I would be his big sister because he's always wanted one.  I feel for him, I think probably because he reminds me alot of myself.  Passionate, fiery, smart alec, scared of commitment, and a definitely hater of religion.  I think alot of that hate has come from two faced people too focused on religion to show him Christ and now he's turned off of Christianity completely.  Ever since that weekend I've been trying to think of a way to tell him who God really is without him being turned off by my sounding to religiousy (yeah I totally just made that word up!).  This is what I decided... God is a football coach.  He is constantly pushing us to be better and get stronger.  Yes, he gets onto us when we mess up but that's only because he knows how great we can be! Yes, that means sometimes he has us doing spiritual up downs in the mud until we get it though our head that we're not the ones in charge.  But, He also offers us grace and forgiveness and always gives us another opportunity to get back in the game and try again. He wants to have a relationship with every one of us and for us to know that he is right there to help us when we don't understand things or we get into trouble.  He holds the game plan in his hands and knows exactly what we need to do to win the game. I think it's an interesting concept... a little out of the box, I know, but God doesn't fit in a box anyway!  So next time you watch the Cowboys playing on a Sunday afternoon or your high school football team under the lights on Friday night, just remember you have a much bigger Coach and he can't wait to put you in the game.