If you are a fellow Washington Football fan then you understand what the Dan Snyder years were like. Everything from Terry Robiskie to “They have cell phones in Hawaii,” and Albert Haynesworth to the swinging gate. It has been a miserable quarter century to be a Washington Football fan.
I also remember being young. I remember Art Monk and Darrell Green. I have spotty memories of the good old days, but the vast majority of my life has been varying degrees of misery. I remember getting the opportunity to cover the Washington Nationals for a local DC blog, however, first I had to cover the football season. Around this time of year or a little before, so, not even halfway through the season, my game story was a review of a corn maze because the team was so bad I didn’t watch the game. It was a good thing too. That was the game Victor Cruz tore them apart.
In the long time between the good old days and the now times I graduated High School, went to College, Got married, moved to Virginia Beach, started a business, and started a family. A lot has happened in my life and in all of that I rediscovered my faith. I have fond memories of going to church as a kid. It was mostly the none church activities like a readathon, Halloween bobbing for apples, science club, and learning to use chop sticks, but Grace Presbyterian Church was a big part of my life. So much so that I returned to it to get married in 2009.
As life happened I ended up drifting away from the church. When we had children my wife wanted to find a church for them to grow up in and it was a long and hard search. Even if we ended up choosing one close to our house, where my sister went, and where the kids were in pre-school. It looks like we choose the church out of convivence but we made sure that it was a church that aligns with our values, and one of my big values is that the leadership of the church is willing to tell us they don’t have all the answers. They are willing to tell us that the Bible isn’t clear and that there are questions that can’t be answered.
One of those questions is the biggest one of all. If we live in a world with a loving God then why do we suffer. This question is so big it has become the reason that many turn away from a life of faith, but after 33 years of suffering as a Washington Football fan I have a greater understanding of salvation and atonement than I have in a long time.
It is a strange thing to compare being a Washington Football fan to being a person living in provincial Rome under a brutal dictator but that’s what Dan Snyder does to a person. In more recent times I tried to give up on the team. I let all my hope die, but still I would find myself drawn to my television on Sundays putting on a game I knew would make me miserable. I watched with middle disinterest as the seasons faded and blended together. As the page turned from Steve Spurrier to Jim Zorn to Jay Gruden and Ron Rivera. It was one bad coach after another. Then there are the quarterbacks. Were they all bad or was it the coaching and ownership that doomed them all? That is another question without any answers.
Imagine being a person in provincial Rome. Living in a time after your city has been sacked and your symbol of hope destroyed. The world is a mess. It is the year of the four Emperors. There is civil war, rebellions, plague, pestilence, and death all around, and then someone tells you a story. A story that salvation isn’t about freedom from Rome, but freedom from the pains and sorrows of manmade things. It is the ways of man and earthly things that bring about our suffering.
The wage of sin might be death but it isn’t always the sinner that pays the price. Dan Snyder sinned against the legacy of Washington Football and he brought suffering most foul to an entire fanbase. Without this suffering we wouldn’t appreciate people like Josh Harris, Adam Peters, Dan Quinn, and Jayden Daniels as much as we do.
I still don’t know if I know why a loving God would allow suffering to exist. He did allow Dan Snyder to purchase the franchise in the first place and brought us decades of pain and frustration, but we have made it through the wilderness, and Jayden Daniels is our Joshua standing on the edge of the promised land.
David Huzzard Writes 