My first football hero was Johnny Unitas.  He was so calm. Guys like Dick Butkus, Ray Nitschke, and Sam Huff roared around the field like predatory beasts. Johnny U just went about his business unperturbed, taking whatever the defense gave him – a bomb to Lenny Moore, a timing pattern to Raymond Berry, ground and pound with Alan Ameche.  He called the plays.  He managed the game in ways no modern quarterback is allowed.  He was, to me, the man.  After bad knees and bad locker-rooms forced him to retire in 1974 the Hall of Fame wanted all his equipment – even hip pads and chin guard.  He generously complied, giving them everything in his locker – except his cleats.  Johnny Unitas said that he wouldn’t surrender his cleats because he liked to wear them when he was mowing the grass.*

            One might point out that for a few dollars (certainly less than $20 back in 1974), Johnny U could have purchased a new pair of cleats to mow the grass with, and his NFL pair could have gone to the Hall of Fame.  But I love the utilitarian sensibility of the NFL’s greatest quarterback ever.

            My great-grandfather, Kady Browning, had a foxhound named Bob that won a field trial back in 1939 and was awarded a silver platter with his name on it.  My granddad drove out to the farm to congratulate his dad, and see the silver platter.  After talking awhile on the porch, my granddad wanted to know where the platter was.  It was out in the yard, with dog food on it.  “Why are you feeding that dog from a silver platter?” my granddad asked.  “Well, it’s his. He won it.”  My great-grandfather replied.  I have this platter in my office, and you can see Bob’s teeth-marks on it.

            I knew a guy back in Ohio who bought three complete sets of Topp’s baseball cards every year, and never took the plastic off the boxes.  He had several friends who did the same.  I always thought a guy could get rich putting old newspapers in Topps baseball card boxes, and sealing them in plastic – how would these guys ever know?  The joy of collecting baseball cards, when you’re a kid, is trading them – I once traded a Don Gullett and a Rawley Fingers for a Pete Rose rookie card.  Of course I don’t  have that card – my mom disposed of it years ago.  But things are made to be used. I collect books, but I collect them to read, not to display.

            All this got me thinking about that passage in Ecclesiastes 3 about there being a time for every purpose under heaven.  “A time for every purpose,” (Ecclesiastes 3.1) communicates a utilitarian reason for each event.  The poem which follows is one of the best known passages in the Bible, and one of the most beautiful ever written.  But more remarkable than its beauty are the breathtaking assertions of its wisdom.

We think of death, mourning, tearing down, weeping, and throwing stones as negative experiences to be avoided, or at least mitigated.  But God tells us that these events are part of the mortal world we inhabit, and serve their purpose.  As the writer of Hebrews reminds us, God’s love is demonstrated in his discipline, and that discipline is rarely enjoyable:

All discipline seems for the moment not to be enjoyable, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. (Hebrews 12.11)

God promises to continue to work on us until He comes again (Philippians 1.6).  If we yield to that promise, then we also yield to challenges, difficulties, even hardships.  When faced with challenges, difficulties, and hardships, then, our first response should not be avoidance or mitigation - as counterintuitive as this may seem.  Our first response should be practical, utilitarian.  Our question should not be, “How may I avoid this,” but “How may I grow stronger from this.”  Because God loves us, hardships may be as useful as Johnny Unitas’ cleats.

               *Frank Gifford, The Glory Game, HarperCollins 2005, pp. 269-270.