A small rant

When I told my friend that I was going to start a blog, she commented that she thought it would be interesting because of my opinionated nature. Well, so far I haven't really had any reason to be opinionated about anything ... until now.

Tonight, I am going to share with you one of my pet peeves. It involves sports and priorities.

My son, JW, plays coach-pitch baseball. Tonight, as we huddled under the shed while the rain ended the play for the night, our coach announced that the team has an opportunity to play in a tournament in a couple of weeks. The tournament would begin on Friday night and end sometime Sunday.

How do you explain to the coach that as much as we want JW to enjoy his experience playing baseball, Sundays are off limits.

In our very small church (we average about 60 in worship on Sundays) I know of 4 families that have had to deal with this issue. For one family it meant that the Dad had to miss at least one service on most Sundays during the summer because his job required him to work the tournaments, but for the other three, it was simply a matter of choice. It is so sad to me that families have to choose between their children participating in sports and worshiping together on Sunday. And it is even more sad that Christian families head out in droves on Sunday mornings to "support" their children/grandchildren rather than teaching them that the day set aside to worship God is more important than whatever sport they happen to be playing at the moment.

I realize that I am treading on thin ice here, but I can't help but wonder what would happen to the current situation if even half of the Christian families just said no, we will not participate in any way on Sundays because that day belongs to God. Something tells me that things would change. Sports are too big of a business to lose the money contributed by Christian families.

So, how did we handle it? Well, for this time it was easy. We will be out of town on the weekend in question so that is all that Ronnie told the coach. If it comes up again, I am sure that it won't be so easy. We want our children to be able to participate in (limited and carefully selected)secular activities and we want them to excel at the things that they do, but I am not sure that these goals can co-exist with our responsibility to teach them that some things cannot be compromised.