Who Is Rooting Against Us?

This last bowl season something caught my attention. Several of my friends remarked in anger and frustration that the given announcers of the game were biased against their team. Now this wasn’t just one game or one team but different people talking about different games with different announcers.

It wasn’t the how the broadcaster spoke, if he was understandable or that he made errors that got my friends worked up into a lather but rather that he didn’t think their team was the better of the two teams. This was an injustice and unfair!

I couldn’t understand why it was such a bother. It doesn’t change anything. Your team doesn’t play any better or worse because of the announcers, the officials are not influenced by it, and the coaches don’t hear it. Really the worse that can happen is that is you are annoyed and you can always turn down the sound.

Then it hit me. People are passionate about their teams. If a commentator points out something that might not show the team in the positive light that we view them, it causes dissonance. He goes against my way of thinking and that isn’t right. It doesn’t matter if he got his facts correct or is doing a good job, if he doesn’t see things my way, he is in the wrong!

We don’t like it when people don’t agree with us, even over something as trivial and arbitrary as sports. We find comfort in having our option validated not challenged. That’s why we so concerned with what everyone thinks about us. We want to have our perception vindicated. If they are not, we feel slighted.

In the end, though the results are not in what people say about the game but what happens on the field. If the color guy says you have no chance and in the end you win by 30, who is right? If the booth proclaims this game has been put away but the team blows a big lead, the loss is going on your record, not the early victory prediction. It is the end result that matters not the prognosticators.

It is the same in our spiritual lives. We worry more about what people say about us than what we really are. But what will matter in the end, what everyone said or how God judges us? The victory isn’t what others say but what He does. Even if everyone is rooting against us, what matters is how we please him.

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us?

Romans 8:31

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