{"id":232,"date":"2003-12-29T01:28:39","date_gmt":"2003-12-29T05:28:39","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=232"},"modified":"2009-01-16T17:27:20","modified_gmt":"2009-01-16T21:27:20","slug":"god-and-football","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2003\/12\/god-and-football\/","title":{"rendered":"God and Football"},"content":{"rendered":"

Living in Wisconsin, I have observed that the line between religion and football is thin. During my formative years, I was the lone Minnesota Vikings fan in a small Wisconsin town. Fortunately for me, the Vikings were quite good during the 1970s … although never quite good enough to win the Super Bowl. More importantly, the Green Bay Packers stunk during those years. After I joined the Church in the early 1980s, I stopped paying attention to professional football because I wanted to keep the Sabbath Day holy, and professional football does not have much to recommend it in that regard.
\n
\nSince moving back to Wisconsin, I have again come into intimate contact with the enemy: Packer fans. They are all around me, and even though I profess complete ignorance of recent developments in professional football, I cannot escape them. Yesterday, at a wedding reception, I learned to my chagrin that the Packer and Vikings were battling each other for a playoff spot. When I was a boy, I used to pray about things like this, until I concluded that God did not hear the prayers of Viking fans. Tonight I found more evidence of that. After the rest of the family was safely in bed, I couldn’t resist taking a peek. Ugh!<\/a> (Breathe slowly. Repeat after me, “I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care…”)<\/p>\n

Thankfully, I am leaving for India on Thursday. Surely, by the time I return the Packers will have been eliminated from the playoffs, and we can all settle in for several months of cold and snow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Living in Wisconsin, I have observed that the line between religion and football is thin. During my formative years, I was the lone Minnesota Vikings fan in a small Wisconsin town. Fortunately for me, the Vikings were quite good during the 1970s … although never quite good enough to win the Super Bowl. More importantly, the Green Bay Packers stunk during those years. After I joined the Church in the early 1980s, I stopped paying attention to professional football because I wanted to keep the Sabbath Day holy, and professional football does not have much to recommend it in that regard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[29],"class_list":["post-232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-politics","tag-popular-culture-and-media"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5709,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232\/revisions\/5709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}