From the Pulpit: Everybody hurts

I love basketball. Baseball is great. Football is fun. Golf is good. Running is … required (for me at least). But I love basketball.

I’ve loved it since I was kid. My grandparents who had cable (we did not) would TAPE games on VHS for me. MAIL them and I would watch the greats of the ‘90s and emerging stars of the early 2000s hit game winning shots, throw down sky scraping dunks, hit deep 3’s, block shots into 10th row. Players like Jordan, Pippen, Stockton, Malone, Olajuwon, Miller, Shaq, Garnett, and of course, Kobe.

To be clear I never liked the Lakers at any point of my childhood. I still don’t. I see them as the Yankees of basketball, just buying their way into a championship roster while my pathetic Timberwolves enter into their second decade of “rebuilding”. But I cried when Kobe died.

At one of the games I saw Bryant play in, he was in especially fine form and just could not miss and those Lakers were just crushing my poor Timberwolves. But when Kobe hit turnaround after turnaround jumper, I didn’t boo, I didn’t scream at him, I just sort of shrugged and I said something like, “You can’t be mad about that. He’s just that good.”

So yeah, I cried when I saw teams taking 24-second violations, having 24 seconds of silence and remembering the late basketball player on Sunday night after his death along with his daughter, daughter’s teammate and six others in a helicopter crash.

Why? Would that affect me? Remember, I don’t even like the Lakers … but I love basketball. 

When things like this happen and a beloved music, athlete, politician, actor dies you will see people respond in a very emotional way. Some folks might be skeptical about that. Was this person more important than a teacher who died of cancer, a soldier who died in combat, a community leader who was killed in a car crash? No, of course not and no one is claiming they are.

But those people who we watch play a game we love, make a movie that moves us, a song that heals us, a speech that inspires us become a part of U.S. They become a part of our story and what happens then when they die suddenly is that it reminds us of that same mortal reality that is always present around us.

So, Kobe’s death breaks into my life in the sense that he was father spending time with his daughter, a guy traveling with friends, a person who had been part of moments of my life even as someone handing my team another loss.

And as people of faith, what we need to remember is that these moments when our hearts are opened to the pain of someone else’s story are moments that God can use to remind us to walk with the people closest to us in their times of need.

Galatians 6:2 says, “Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way, you will fulfill the law of Christ.” Whether the death of Kobe hit you emotionally or not, remember that we all experience places of pain and moments of loss. Sit with those friends who are in the depths of recent loss. Check in on the people whose grief may be old, but it is still present and painful. Walk with each other in love and remember that our stories are connected by the God who made each of us.

Deal lovingly and gently with each other. Meet others in their stories with the same love that Christ gives to you. Life is too short to do otherwise.