What’s so important to you that you’d like to take it to your grave?

By David McElroy · August 4, 2012

Meet Nate Davis. He’s such a devoted fan of the University of Alabama’s football team that he’s covered roughly 70 percent of his upper body (so far) with tattoos attesting to his love of a school and a football team. Because of his fanaticism, he’s made himself a laughingstock to many people who consider him crazy or weird. But he doesn’t care, because he ultimately seems more dedicated to Alabama football than anything else in life.

I started thinking about Davis Friday evening because of an 8-minute ESPN film I’d seen earlier in the day. The short film deals with people around the country who have taken their love of various sports teams to the graves. They’ve been buried in team jerseys and caskets bearing the logos of the teams they cheered for. One man even had his funeral with his body propped up in a recliner, with a television showing Pittsburgh Steelers football games. (You can watch the short film at the end of this article.)

Are these people crazy?

My first instinct is to call them crazy, but I suspect there’s a bit more going on than that. I believe we all need purpose and some subject upon which to focus our energies. Without that, we become bored, lethargic and rudderless. When people become this kind of “super fan,” it merely means that they filled an empty spot in their lives — one that was devoid of purpose — with an obsession for a team.

Why that sport? Why that team? I’m not sure it matters why. When there’s an empty spot in a life, I suspect the first thing rushes in that makes itself seem socially acceptable at the moment — because we crave something to identify with and something to devote ourselves to.

For others, it might be music or gaming or books or partying or a thousand other things. But whatever thing takes that central focus in your life becomes your purpose and passion. You might become a sports super fan. You might become the ultimate Xbox nerd. You might become an expert on Star Trek trivia.

Or you could do something that actually matters — something that could fill your need for purpose and also make the world a better place.

What I’d like to suggest is that the things that people get attached to are frequently interchangeable. And I’d like to suggest that we would be happier with our lives if we found something worthwhile to latch onto.

If you’re going to be obsessed with something — at least enough to make it a driving purpose in your life — wouldn’t it be better to be purposeful in choosing it? Instead of letting yourself get obsessed about football games or baseball games, wouldn’t it be better to find your meaning in something more in keeping with your higher values?

If you’re a Christian, for instance, that might be ministry through your church or another organization. It might even be moving into a full-time ministry role. It might just be getting seriously involved with a homeless shelter or a prison ministry. There are dozens of things you could choose from. But wouldn’t it be better to be intentional in your selection — rather than just taking whatever drifted into your life and became a habit?

Something is going to become a religion in your life. It might be work. It might be a sports team. It might be alcohol or drugs. It might be gambling. It might be loving and protecting your wife and children. It might be serving others.

Since you need a purpose, isn’t it better to pick one intentionally? If you just take whatever shows up in your life, you might wake up one day and realize you’ve become the local version of Nate Davis.

When you go to your grave, wouldn’t you like to have something more important to take with you than tattoos of a long-dead football coach or some team’s jerseys? I enjoy some sports, so I don’t object to enjoying them. In fact, I’m a Crimson Tide football fan, just as Davis is, but it’s just a game, not an obsession, to me.

Choose your purpose and make it your obsession if you want to, but choose wisely. We only get to experience this life once. Make it worth it. When you die, take something worth living for to your grave with you.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts