This is Pastor Tim’s newspaper article which appeared in the Evening Leader on Tuesday, July 19, 2022
Do you remember the nursery rhyme “The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg”? There are a few different versions, but the main point of the story is there is a farmer who has a goose. One day, he went out to gather eggs and finds that his goose laid an egg of solid gold. The famer is dumbfounded by this and has no explanation. He goes in to tell his wife and they are overjoyed that they are going to be able to make ends meet because of this golden egg. The famer goes out the next morning, and sure enough, the goose had laid another golden egg. The farmer just can’t believe his luck! He has no idea how this goose if physically able to produce golden eggs, but now this has happened two days in a row. The next morning, another golden egg, and then the day after that and the day after that. Everyday when the farmer gathers eggs, there is a golden egg.
The farmer and his family quickly go from poverty to riches because of these golden eggs. After a few weeks, the farmer starts to become curious as to where the gold is being produced. He realizes that this magical ability must be somewhere inside of the goose. Soon, one golden egg a day is not enough for the farmer and in his greed, he kills the goose and cuts it open with an ax. Inside the goose, there is no gold. The farmer now has nothing, and the goose is dead. No more golden eggs ever again.
This parable is a story about the nature of greed. Had the farmer just been happy with the steady income of one egg a day, the goose could have lived to a ripe old age and the farmer could have lived off the proceeds for the rest of his life. But because of his greed, he killed the goose that laid the golden egg.
There are a whole lot of applications I could make with this age-old story, but the one I want to make right now is with the NFL. Yes, bet you didn’t see that one coming, did you?
I am tired of the NFL, and I haven’t followed it in a decade. The few times I had watched a game, anytime anything meaningful happens, there is a penalty. Which is my first gripe with the way the game is played. Because of penalties and instant replays, the game is MIND NUMBINGLY SLOW. I realize we are milking every second of commercial time we can get, but this is ridiculous. College football isn’t much better. There are four, 15-minute quarters in an NFL game. Do you know in those 60 minutes how much time we are actually playing the game? According to a study conducted by the Quarts company in 2019, there is an average of 11 minutes of time when something is actually happening on the field. That is in the whole game. The average length of an NFL game? 3 hours and 5 minutes. That is 185 minutes you watch for 11 minutes of something happening. My time is worth more than that.
The second reason I quit watching the NFL is that sports was supposed to be an escape from my situation. I don’t want a bunch of politics in it. I am getting overwhelmed with politics as it is. I don’t need to add to the onslaught when I am trying to have some downtime. I don’t care what side of politics we are talking about. Just give me a break.
I can remember a time when the NFL was prime. I used to look forward so much to Sunday afternoons. When I lived in Fort Recovery in the late 90s, I had two old RCA TVs hooked up in my basement so that I could watch two games at once. I loved it. I was even a Cleveland Browns fan, which should prove what a fan I was because the Browns weren’t doing much worth rooting for back in those days. I was a solid source of revenue for them. I bought jerseys and shirts. I even have an e-mail address that I still use for junk mail that references Cleveland sports teams.
The thing I saw that inspired this article was in my Google news feed. Apparently, for this season, teams have been approved to go back to using old colors and uniforms from bygone eras. I know they have done a little of this in recent years, but it is going to be a major part of this upcoming season. I swear it feels like the NFL is trying to resurrect the goose. I just hope for their sake, it isn’t too late. But it is going to take more than changing uniform colors and logos back to bygone eras to bring fans back.