God’s Unexpected Gameplan: Sports, Friendship & You?

The beauty of sports is that it has always been a way to bridge communities. Personally, I’m not an athletic person. I would choose to lay in bed instead of running around and sweating profusely. But God being God, He has a way of turning people’s lives around.

My life changed the moment I found myself being part of a sports community.

I was a young teen in high school when my circle of friends invited me to join this sport, which they had all been playing. Fast forward eight years, I found myself being the only one still playing this sport when all of them had quit a long time ago.

Some of them even question why I’m still playing the sport.

Now, you may be thinking, what made this couch potato continue on in this sport? Don’t worry, I ask myself that every time, too, when I’m running around in court chasing after the ball.

Of course, there are fun moments, but there are also tiring moments. Moments when I wanted to give up and quit. However, with perseverance and strength that came solely from God, I pushed through the difficult moments of struggle and discovered a deeper purpose in my involvement in the sport.

Through sports, I met the people who would begin my journey of faith and have been journeying with me up until today!

The leaders of my sports community introduced me to Christ, and they also taught me that there should be a deeper meaning behind doing sports, and ultimately, it should be pointing the lost souls towards Christ.

Friendship, Faith, and Sports Ministry

After staying on for many years, I eventually grew into a position of leadership for the team, and that caused me to look at sports in the lens of God even more and understand what being a sports minister is like.

Over the years, I’ve watched people join the team and then leaving the team eventually, be it to join another team or for other reasons.

I’ve always struggled with this.

It hurt when I built friendships with people after spending a lot of time growing and nurturing the friendship, only for them to leave in the end.

It felt like a never-ending cycle of meeting new people, becoming good friends and teammates, but eventually they leave, and the whole cycle starts again with a new batch of people.

After experiencing that countless times, I found myself asking God whether I had truly impacted their lives and whether I had done my job as a sports minister.

In recent years, my perspective on friendship through sports has changed.

I came to an understanding that people will leave eventually because we can’t be playing sports our entire life, right?

But what matters is how their time being with the team has impacted them for the better through the Godly values that was shared to them, or the meaningful memories that was made, and my hope and prayer is that they will remember those values even when they’ve moved on to do other things in life.

Shaping Young Lives Through Sports

By the grace of God, I also stepped into coaching, and that made me also see how big a role sports can play in the lives of young people, especially, and that made me have a greater sense of importance in my role as a sports minister to these young lives.

I’ve met people who made sports their identity and their sole purpose in life that they would compromise their own values in order to win.

I’ve also witnessed some coaches of other teams screaming and shouting vulgar words at these young players and them not being able to say anything and just accepting whatever the coaches shouted at them as the truth.

That really made me question why some coaches would act that way, knowing that they play a big part in the lives of the players and their self-esteem.

It made me want to impart more Godly values and truth into their lives so that they can grow into people who would be encouragers and build other people up.

Sharing Faith and Finding Strength

Sports also became a platform to share my faith and how God has been there for me through the different experiences and changes in life.

After having conversations with different players who went through similar situations as I did, be it sports-related or life struggles, I found myself knowing how to encourage and minister to them the same way I was encouraged by God as well as the different leaders in my life.

I’ve also mustered up the courage to pray for them when they share their struggles with me, and I hope that gives them a glimpse of what having Christ in your life is like.

It’s always been emphasized to me that we can only do sports up until a certain age of our lives, so what really matters is the values and lessons that we learn and experience through sports that will carry us through the ups and downs of life.

God’s Perfect Gameplan

The journey of sports in my life was all planned by God perfectly. From how I was introduced to the sport and then coming to know Christ through it.

I always tell myself that my life would have turned out so differently if I had not said yes to my friend’s invitation to try out the sport or if I had given up in the early years when it got hard.

I’m eternally grateful to God for seeing me through the different seasons of my life in sports, from being a player, to growing as a leader and then becoming a coach and having this platform of sports to reach out to different lives, be it players, their parent,s and school teachers as well.

It made me want to be a better vessel for Christ, knowing that God has placed me there for a reason and it’s to glorify Him and show them the goodness of Christ through serving them, reflecting Christ’s love in every interaction.

I’ve been blessed to be able to experience the beauty of friendship through sports. Whether it’s having meetups and meals with my teammates, supporting them during competitions, or celebrating different life milestones as well.

Seeing how sports has changed my life as a whole, I have no doubts that it has changed other people’s lives as well.