Watching the Super Bowl with an eye for safety
Like a lot of people I like a good Super Bowl game. In recent years, I’ve found a fun way to be directly involved with it. You could even say I’m right on the field with the players.
Well, my thoughts are. Praying is something I’ve done about injuries all my life, both for myself and others, and it brings healing. So rather than just feel bad about an injury I see while watching TV, I pray about it.
My instinct to pray goes back to a healing experience I witnessed while playing a friendly game of hockey years ago. A player was badly injured during the game. I saw it from the player’s box while taking a rest. All the other players went to his rescue and everyone was oooooing and aaaahhhhing. I decided to go to God instead.
The other players helped the one who was injured over to the box where he could sit down. Everyone was being super nice and trying to help by telling him how to take care of the injury, like the need to put ice on it and so forth. They were also making many predictions about how bad it might be.
I forget whether he’d twisted his knee or ankle, but it seemed serious enough that he wouldn’t be able to play the rest of the night.
I tried to lift my thinking above the whole scene before me, like Jesus seemed to do. Jesus didn’t accept what everyone else around him accepted as real. Most people hold disease and discord to be a fixed fact, something to be fixed or at least managed.
Jesus understood God’s love and care for His children to be the fixed fact, something permanent. He understood that man is purely spiritual, and that God maintains man’s harmony always despite what the visuals tell us.
Mary Baker Eddy explains in her book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, how Jesus healed. She talks about how he saw something different than what appears real to the senses. He saw what God sees. He knew that God’s goodness is always present and all powerful, and this fact makes disease, discord and accident powerless and heals it.
Eddy wrote, “Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God’s own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick. Thus Jesus taught that the kingdom of God is intact, universal, and that man is pure and holy.” 1
When I lifted my thought above the material scene of accident and injury to see what God sees, I was amazingly inspired. I realized that the kingdom of heaven was at hand, as the Scriptures tell us, and that we were actually living in that kingdom. I really felt to some degree, the all presence and power of God right there in that ice rink. I knew there were no accidents in God, in His kingdom, and that consequently this player couldn’t be hurt. God’s love is too powerful and too present to allow us to be hurt.
It was a very quick and unexpected turn around. This fellow player got up in a few minutes and started playing again and nothing more was said about the injury.
But because I felt God–and feeling God is much different than just praying to God–I knew that it was God who had corrected the situation and healed that man.
And that’s just one time that I’ve seen my effort to keep my thought God-centered make a difference to others. I try really hard to “pray without ceasing” as St. Paul tells us to do in the Bible. And I’ve found that praying about whatever is going on in my experience can also touch the people around me.
So when I’m watching live sports (and even when the game is not live), I know my prayers can make a difference not only in my own life but in the health and well-being of everyone I’m thinking about.
This is the extra dimension I’m bringing to my Super Bowl viewing this Sunday. Do you want to try it too?
Posted on Friday, February 3rd, 2012 at 4:06 pm | Follow responses with the RSS feedTopics: Sports | Tags: athletics, super bowl
Thanks for the offer, Mark! I’ll try this out — and I’m sure others will too.
Our prayers will be apparent. Every prayer has its effect.
Thank you for sharing this, Mark! The Christian Science Organization here in Madison, Wisconsin will be hosting a superbowl party as a fun, social event, and I think I might read this to the group before the game! There’s a temptation, I think, to say that with all the more serious world problems going on, that things like injuries in a football game aren’t worth our prayers. But considering just how much world thought will be focused on this game during those three hours, I’d say it’s actually hugely important to stand porter and resist the general tide of human thought that believes we’re all mortal and therefore susceptible to all the conditions of mortality. The work you are doing is inspiring!
Thank you Gordon. I’d love to hear how it goes over if you end up reading it to your party. I think it is vitally important to keep thought right on any of these suggestions that try to make us believe we are separated from God — whether small or big issues. Why should we take in injury to be a natural part of our lives, as if there is no God? It is interesting during these games also how they replay it over and over again in slow motion giving precise causality to an injury. I have proven that there is a higher law than physiology many times, and I’ll bet you have too. Jesus certainly proved it in the resurrection, to use the ultimate example. Although it was also proven in many other stories in the Bible, like the three men thrown into the fiery furnace. Have a great game day!!