A few years back, Herm Edwards was speaking in a post game interview as the head coach of the New York Jets. He was asked by a reporter how he felt about the loss and did it matter to Edwards considering how poorly the team had been performing that season.

Edwards responded "This is what's great about sports, the greatest thing about sports is you play to win the game. Hello? You play to win the game. You don't play just to play it. That's the great thing about sports, you play to win. And I don't care if you have any wins. You go play to win. When you start telling me it don't matter, then retire... GET OUT! Because it matters. This whole conversation bothers me."

Scripture is the basis of our faith. But, sometimes, I think we get so caught up in life that we start to look at familiar verses and almost label them as cliché. As sad as that sounds, we hear verses like John 3:16, Philippians 4:13 and Jeremiah 29:11 and simply pass them by or say to ourselves, “Oh, I’ve heard that a thousand times.” While that may be true, it doesn’t take away the relevance of Scripture!

A high school coach of mine once said that when things go wrong, it is important to go back to the basics—to the foundation of the game—and to re-establish a routine. He was talking about softball, but I think this relates to our faith in a profound way.

When you go into a game, athletes have to think they will win. They can’t think they might win. They have to think they will win. If that happens on both sides, it means that there will be two teams entering the game thinking the same thing, and only one will get to live it out. No matter how much we wish we could all win, in the end, one of us will lose. And a big determining factor in who comes out victorious is the infamous game clock.

No matter how much we wish we could, we can’t put more time on the clock in any game. Each game we play is set up to be played in a certain amount of time. Whether it is counted by seconds and minutes or by innings or sets, each game has a set time frame. What we do in this amount of time determines the outcome of the game.

Imagine playing your sport without a ball when one is needed. You walk 18 holes swinging a club aimlessly without once striking a golf ball. You shoot baskets without feeling the ball release from your fingertips. You drop back to throw a 50-yard bomb to a wide open receiver for a game-winning touchdown, but there’s nothing in your hand. Yes, it sounds ludicrous to do these things. It would eliminate the game itself. Most sports require a ball in order to fulfill the goals and objectives of the game. Simply put, a game without a ball is not even a game at all.