the encounter

Recently on This American Life:

Act Two. Team Spirit in the Sky.

This past Christmas a story swept the internet about a football coach at a Christian high school in Texas who inspired his team’s fans to root for the opposition: a team from the local juvenile correctional facility. Among the thousands of emails that the coach received in response to his actions, one stood out to him. Trisha Sebastian mentioned her loss of faith, and coach Hogan got a message from God that he was meant to bring her back. We eavesdrop on their phone calls. (19 minutes)

Click here to listen to the audio of the story. It starts at 20:02 into the show.

I love the initial story here of the fans cheering for the other team. Great work coach! We need lots more of that! Even just in regular high school games.

But as you listen to the story, you hear Trisha tell Ira Glass that she’s leaning towards agnosticism after the loss of a dear friend. She shares this with the coach and he attempts to change her mind with apologetics and logic.

After their first hour of talking on the phone, Trisha seems very turned off. It wasn’t what she wanted, needed or expected.

Trisha points out that the coach mentioned Hitler in his explanation of evil in the world. She then adds that her and her friends have a rule — anytime you pull the “Hitler card” out in any argument, you automatically lose.

I believe the coach makes some good points – such as “do not for an instance believe anyone who can tell you why your friend died.”

After the phone call Trisha shares that she believed that talking to “this man who really believes in God” she might “find out the answers to the burning questions she has.” Trisha says that he basically tried to argue the existence of God rather than comforting her.

She also admitted that she wants to believe in God but the way the coach was attempting to bring her to faith just didn’t speak to her.

Granted, hindsight is 20/20, but I wonder if Trisha would have been more interested if the coach had simply said, “I don’t know why your friend died. I don’t know why anyone dies. But know that I understand your hurt and more importantly God understands and suffers with you. He grieves with you. He cares for you and loves you.”

In the end Trisha ends up calling him back and the coach explains much of the hurt, tragedy and suffering in this world as part of sin and our fallen world.

Trisha later admits that she did get an answer, but she’s not sure it’s what she was looking for. Ira Glass says that since their conversations, Trisha has admitted that she’s at least thinking about God a lot more — even if she still doesn’t believe.

These thoughts from Peter Rollins come to mind as I listen to the story:

“Faith is a journey. It’s about wrestling. It’s not about getting the right answer so much as laying down the sense that we have the right answer and realizing we’ll continue to change and transform and learn new things and unlearn lots of things.”

“To ‘know the truth and the truth will set you free’ is not so much about knowing the facts about God as much as its about having an intimate encounter with God and being transformed by it.”

What do you think? How would you have responded as the coach? How would you want to be responded to in the midst of hurt and tragedy?

BTW – HT to Dave McHam for pointing the show out to me.

Tags: apologetics, Faith, Grapevine Christian football coach, Ira Glass, logic, NPR, Peter Rollins, This American Life, This I Used to Believe