{"id":970,"date":"2011-11-24T12:17:27","date_gmt":"2011-11-24T17:17:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/?p=970"},"modified":"2011-11-24T12:20:18","modified_gmt":"2011-11-24T17:20:18","slug":"the-detroit-lions-and-a-sentimental-thanksgiving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/2011\/11\/the-detroit-lions-and-a-sentimental-thanksgiving\/","title":{"rendered":"The Detroit Lions and a Sentimental Thanksgiving"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Today, Novemeber 24, 2011, the people of the United States celebrate Thanksgiving, a holiday that ultimately remembers the Pilgrims and early foundings of the colonies that eventually became the United States.\u00a0 Those of us who are Christians add our own desire to thank God for all the things that He has done through Christ, is continuing to do for us, and will do one day when He returns.\u00a0 Seeing that the Pilgrims were Christians we identify with them when others in our culture do not.\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, the mainstay of the\u00a0holiday in America has come to be family, food, and football.\u00a0 I do not view those as evils in and of themselves.\u00a0 They all have a special place in\u00a0our hearts.\u00a0 Outside of\u00a0our relationship to God, there is nothing more significant that our relationship to our families.\u00a0 Of course, I have always had a special relationship to food!\u00a0 There has never been a pumpkin pie I did not like.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I could talk about my family with great emotion and remember the family feasts in very positive terms.\u00a0 But here I want to talk about football, not as a man who loves football, but in a way that shows the connection of football and family.\u00a0 The big game today between the\u00a0Packers and the Lions is being heralded as a replay of the\u00a01962 game on November 22 when the two-loss Lions upset the undefeated and champion Packers.\u00a0 The picture above is from that game — the sacking of Bart Starr which happened often that day.\u00a0 What makes this a special “football to family connection” is that when I was nine years old my family was staying for a couple of weeks in a motel in Syracuse, New York in November of 1962.\u00a0 That is where I watched that game.\u00a0 That is my first memory of watching a professional football game.\u00a0 My Dad worked for General Electric.\u00a0 My parents were married in Detroit and became Detroit sports fans.\u00a0 That’s why I grew up\u00a0following Al Kaline as my favorite baseball player–and why I was rooting for the Lions that day.\u00a0 For those two weeks in Syracuse, General Electric was deciding where to send my Dad for his next assignment with the company.\u00a0\u00a0 We ended up in\u00a0Huntsville, Alabama which became my real home for the rest of my life\u00a0and where I became an Alabama Crimson Tide fan.\u00a0 Every Thanksgiving I think about those two weeks in Syracuse and how the Providence of God moved so that the course of my life was set.\u00a0 When I watch the game today, I believe I will think about that more than I usually do.\u00a0 It will truly be a sentimental Thanksgiving when football reminds me of all of life.\u00a0 I will thank the God who made me of\u00a0His blessings in my life.\u00a0 \u00a0No matter what the score.\u00a0 But I will be rooting for the Lions just as I did 49 years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, Novemeber 24, 2011, the people of the United States celebrate Thanksgiving, a holiday that ultimately remembers the Pilgrims and early foundings of the colonies that eventually became the United States.\u00a0 Those of us who are Christians add our own desire to thank God for all the things that He has done through Christ, is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[26],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/970"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=970"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/970\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":973,"href":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/970\/revisions\/973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/our-hope.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}