Stay Close!
2011 was a magical football season for Baylor University. Sparked by a great team, yet all held together by the phenomenal quarterback play of Robert Griffin III, affectionately also known as “RG3.”
I can recall attending a Baylor game that year in Waco, at the height of RG3’s remarkable season, and at one point standing in awe in the stadium as nearly 50,000 fans chanted his name.
“RG3! RG3! RG3!” they shouted.
With each great game he played, his name crept higher and higher on the potential Heisman Trophy winner list (an award he did eventually win that year). With each game that Baylor won, RG3 became more of a living legend, a Waco hero.
Which meant that I, too, became a Waco hero. According to some, I look like RG3. During that year, in 2011, we had similar hairstyles. We are also both black, so naturally, we were twinkies.
All around Waco people would mistake me for RG3. At the grocery store, on hiking trails, at the zoo, in restaurants.
I remember walking past a dad and his son in a parking garage, “Dad was that RG3?” “Yep, it sure was son.”
Or there was the woman that came up to Lisa and I while we were having dinner at a restaurant and said, “It’s good to see that you’re okay, especially after what happened yesterday”
The previous day, during a game RG3 was tackled hard, forcing him to sit out for a bit. This concerned woman at the restaurant was glad to see that after such a hard tackle, I was okay and enjoying a nice meal with my lady friend.
One of my favorites was when I would run on a trail near the Baylor campus and cars passing by full of college kids or other students out on the trail would see me and start cheering: “RG3, RG3, RG3!”
Sports have a wonderful knack for creating hope and occasions to celebrate and believe in the impossible. They can offer us ways to dream, sometimes those dreams come true, and sometimes they do not. With sports, tears and cheers can all be swept up together.
As all of you are aware, I am not RG3. Nevertheless, RG3 was such a spark of hope, his story so inspiring, that when people saw me it did not matter that so many of them were wrong about who I was, in that moment what mattered most was that I became the person that stood for that hope. That year in Waco, for all the Baylor Bear fans there was something special about being close and near that spark, all of that not cheapened by a few hundred instances of mistaken identity.
We certainly get it wrong sometimes. Times we are less than fantastic, times we think this or that about what it means to be a follower of Jesus, not all of it proving to be right. However, in our prayers and in our worship, while doing our best to direct our hearts towards God, and as we hear from God’s love letter to us each Sunday in the Bible, we do so not to be right, but to be close. The Holy Spirit handles the being right piece.
With God, with our faith, and with matters of the heart, it is not always about rightness, but more about closeness, closeness to the one that sparks hope for us. For us, that hope is found in God, a God that never leaves and has promised to stay close to us even when we get it wrong.
Go Bears… Oops. I meant to say: God loves you and we love you. See you at church.
Korey +
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