Go Pack Go!

I love the Green Bay Packers. My family is from Wisconsin and over they years they have been a great team to root for. I have gone through ups and downs, good seasons and bad. Since I work on Sunday, I don’t get to watch as much football as I would like, and the Packers don’t come on TV here all the time. I have to tape the games and watch them later, and this season every time Green Bay was on Television, someone or something ruined the games outcome before I could watch.

But not this week. This week I got to see the Packers go head to head with their rival Bears and take them down, in their own house, to go to the Super Bowl. I will never forget watching that game saying “this is happening, we are going to go to the Super Bowl.” I could not believe that we won. I’ve been to a lot of Super Bowl parties in recent years, but never have I been so excited than about this one. The team I pull for is actually going, and there is more on the line this time than every before, especially since all the kids in my youth group are rooting against me (which always seems to happen, no matter what team I choose).

As I was celebrating this, I started to think about the way I talk about my favorite football team. When the Packers win, I say “we won,” but when the Packers lose I say “they lost.” I think this is because as people, we like to associate ourselves with winning and disassociate ourselves with losing. We want people to think of us as winners, not losers. We want to lump ourselves in with the people that win, and yet we try to pretend we don’t know the people who lose.

Isaiah 53:3, when talking about Jesus, says: He was hated and rejected; his life was filled with sorrow and terrible suffering. No one wanted to look at him. We despised him and said, "He is a nobody!" Jesus wasn’t a winner, not by the standards that we so often follow. Sure, He was God in the flesh, but few people saw Him that way. Most saw Him as a loser. It was the “winners” who tried to stop Him and eventually had Him killed. We work so hard to be a winner, and yet it seems like Jesus did everything He could to show us through His own life that all that stuff doesn’t really matter. It’s the heart of a person that has been changed that matters, and that’s when we really win.