Our church does this program every couple of weeks called the Amateur Church Podcast. Several pastors do research, ask questions of one another, and shoot the breeze about an assortment of topics: from the resurrection of Christ to the origin of the universe, to baseball. I enjoy their mix of perspectives and personalities, and also hearing more from and about these men whom I respect, as well as the relationship between them. A couple of our pastors played college football, one played professionally, and others are die hard baseball fans. One of my favorite episodes is titled, “Can I Love God and Sports?”
I used to not get it.
When I emerged from being completely physically awkward in my later teens and 20’s, I liked to play sports. It was fun to learn technique, better motor skills, see improvement, and move in a new way. And, I’m kind of competitive, which doesn’t hurt. But I didn’t really like to watch sports. I just didn’t get it. So when I moved to Indiana, I was gobsmacked with the utter devotion to sport and team fandom. Why would I use my time to watch other people doing something I’d like to be doing? I didn’t get March Madness and all of its brackets and decision making, I didn’t grasp the part of the brain that remembered stats and scores and team members, and try as I might, I most definitely did not understand the draw of Fantasy Football. FANTASY football (clearly I still don’t get it).
But as I got older, our boys did too. And so did our businesses.
But as the years passed and I traveled into my 30’s, becoming a mother for the 3rd, 4th, and 5th time (to boys, a girl, and still more boys), I learned more and more about what makes both boys and businesses so interesting. I read more and more business books, and sprinkled in a few sports books too (this is one of my favorites). I also noticed that some of my favorite watching and listening were sports related or epic-battle type flicks. We also play a lot of board games, where it’s totally okay to be cutthroat for 45 minutes and then return to love and friendship afterwards. I also learned that my judging mind (as in, the Meyers-Briggs type J) prefers to think of things in black and white terms. Decisiveness and wanting closure tend to come along with this type.
Over time, I found that owning a business and learning about Business was interesting to me because there were finite milestones, profits, losses, a balance sheet. Black and white. You can’t argue with cash. It’s there or it isn’t. There is something really profound about this in the mind of a stay at home mom whose job is never finite and never done. While the human heart is fuzzy and hard to measure, profit and loss are loud and clear.
There is also something dispassionate
about business and sports. In the earlier years of our first business Streamline Designs, we had friends who were business partners, sharing a 50/50 equity split between families. It was messy at the time, but now it seems clear to me. Although we deeply loved our partners, I learned that businesses really can’t love, feel, or care. The business is not a family and it’s not a church. Organizations can have a corporate culture that reflects these human values. However, a business itself, if for-profit, exists to provide value to the world in exchange for cash. That’s it. For-profit businesses are just that. For profit. Anything else gained is a side benefit. Because profit is how companies are measured, it is how they are aimed at conception, how they grow, and why they die. At the end of the day, a business doesn’t have feelings. And sport doesn’t either. It doesn’t have preferences or a heart. These two are constructs whose origins are practical or recreational. Like sport, business has winners and losers. You can shake and bake and do some clever accounting, you can shout at the ref or the TV all you want but in the end, there is a winner and a loser. There is always a bottom line.
Our family takes a trip to Wisconsin once per year to the biggest aviation and aerospace trade show in the world. We stay at the same house, we swim at the same beach, play on the same playground, and go to the same air show every July. Because we go on a yearly cycle, we see how the children interact with the same spaces each year. It’s a milestone for us, because of the regularity of the trip and what it reveals about each member of the family after another year has elapsed. Who’s the MVP on this year’s road trip? Who can walk around without full supervision? Who is potty trained? Who doesn’t need to nap any more? It’s discrete, yet cyclical.
In a similar way, there is usually another season for a business or a team. If the business is still alive, if the franchise still exists, there will be another season to tweak the process, the inputs, the players and their roles. Another year to train harder, get ahead, try again. There is also something beautiful about this business and sport seasonal cycle that can reveal improvement and change.
There is a lot more touchy-feely stuff
in our culture today than there was 100 years ago. Partly driven by affluence, partly by the proliferation of experts in every field, we live in a society where everyone gets awarded for participation and everyone has some kind of nuanced syndrome. The more gray and relativistic the world seems to get, the more our hearts long for what is certain. While God is the only one who is unchanging and secure, the world gets blurrier all the time. And it is always moving faster.
As the Day draws near, the commands to fill the earth, to subdue it, and to take dominion over creation (in Genesis 1 notably this is a command to steward, not pillage) grow restless in the human heart. These were the original assignment. I think the farther we get from dominion work like building, animal husbandry, and agriculture, the more our hearts long for dominion in a different arena.
I think I’m starting to get it.
The human heart loves to win. That’s part of dominion built into us. The human heart loves something finite, discrete, and attainable when so much of life is fuzzy and continuous. The human heart gravitates toward that which it thinks will satisfy, to give it a win or to clear a profit. We all want to justify our existence, our thinking, ourselves. Ultimately, there is an end to time and earth as we know it today. And there is only one who justifies. The Day will disclose all hidden things, and Jesus will return to judge the quick and the dead, pronounce the winners and losers. For even history has a bottom line.
PS: Did you know that American Football’s origin was spawned by the end of the Civil War? I didn’t either. But absolutely loved this podcast.