Sports

My son wants to be a professional athlete. He's not particular about the sport - football, baseball, basketball - he'd take any job. I tell him that no one makes it to the big leagues except freaks (the ratio of pro athletes to regular folks qualifies them as freaks), but that doesn't make much difference.

My first instinct when he brings this up is to belittle sports because they're frivolous. They don't manufacture a product like the auto industry does or provide a needed service like a plumber. They don't serve anyone in meaningful ways like a doctor or teacher or social worker does. But then he plays his trump card. He says this to me...

He says, "But Dad, what about Tim Tebow?"

Tebow is to the you-shouldn't-be-a-pro-athlete argument, what dynamite is to rock/paper/scissors--nothing beats it. It's also not fair, just like dynamite.

The Tebow model for justifying a career in pro sports, in case you're not familiar with it, goes like this: professional sports provides a platform for Christian influence, ministry, and evangelism that no other industry provides. Just as look at what Tim's done with it! It has to be good and right! Right?

Like I said, it's unfair.

Here's why: Tebow's justification doesn't work as the justification for a career in sports because it puts the same Tebow expectation on any and every professional Christian athlete. Not everyone is called to be a pastor or teacher or evangelist. Not everyone is called to be Tim Tebow. Some are called to Jason Hansons. Quiet, steady, rock-solid Jason Hansons.

Would it be un-Christian to quietly go about your athletic career, working hard, working as unto the Lord, without praise, and doing it in such ways that only your teammates and coaches know anything about your faith? If the answer is no, if it wouldn't be un-Christian, then the Tebow model doesn't stand up as the justification for such a career. It may be his, but not everyone's, and not necessarily my boy's. If the answer is yes...well, the answer's not yes, it's no.

So there must be more to our choice of vocation than the potential leverage for proclaiming the gospel.

I look again at my gut objection, that pro athletes "don't serve anyone in meaningful ways like a doctor or teacher or social worker does." As I think about the nature of work, I realize that my perceptions of value here are arbitrary. My gut tells me that the work of a doctor is intrinsically more valuable than that of a mechanic, whose work is more valuable than that of a pro athlete, whose work might be just a smidge better than a Hollywood actor.

Why do I think that? I shouldn't think that.

If I work in a plant in Louisville producing baseball bats, will I be doing more valuable work than playing the game for a paying audience? Less valuable? Is writing code for an actuarial table intrinsically better than writing it for a computer game? If so, how does the line get drawn? If not, why do we find it so easy to draw such lines?

I've always thought, and so told my kids, that a career in professional sports is silly and beneath one's dignity. Now, I'm not so sure. Jobs have become so specialized and fragmented that it's hard to qualify one as noble and another as silly. There are extremes, of course, and those tend to be easier to classify. A farmer works hard and feeds people. That's a good job and a no-brainer, right? A drug-dealer or day-time talkshow host destroys lives--his own and others. No-brainer, again. But between the two, where most of us work, it gets difficult. And I think it's difficult because, extremes notwithstanding, it's a futile exercise. To try to assign some value to work based on its cosmic good, or whatever, is just silly. It breaks down as soon as you look closely at it.

If Joe works in a factory producing picture frames, does he need to discern the empirical value of picture frames in society in order to determine the value of his work? We don't need picture frames, not really. They're nice but not necessary. But if Joe stops his thinking there, then he's sunk. He's living a wasted life. On the other hand, if Joe remembers that he's providing for his family through "honest" work, that God hasn't prohibited us from making picture frames (not that I'm aware of), that he's exercising dominion over the earth by subduing raw materials and creating something useful, then Joe has a career to be proud of. One of the leading Christians of the church in Philippi was Lydia, a seller of purple. Does anyone really need purple? No, but God made purple, so it's good. There's no scriptural prohibition against it, and as far as we know, God left her alone to keep selling it.

So maybe the criteria for work's value is not an empirical quality of the service or product, but something in the act of working itself. But that begs a question: what is the something?

The answer to that helps me draw my lines clearly. The something is faith. Paul says in Romans 14, "whatever does not proceed from faith is sin." And what is faith? Believing that God's word is true and that it's our only guide in all of life. If my son's choice (should he have the opportunity) to become a pro athlete proceeds from that, genuinely proceeds from that, then who am I to stop him?

Of course, he'd have to play on Sundays.

Hmm...maybe I need to check my gut again.