First Love

“No, this trick won't work...How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?”             Albert Einstein

Do you remember your fist love? I do. It was 4^th grade and I would ride my bike by her house everyday on the way to school and sometimes we would walk together on the way. But wait, this isn’t about that kind of love, I’m talking about sports. My first love is football. I know this blog is supposed to be somewhat about golf, but in sports, I think of football as one of the greatest team sports there is. When I was a boy I dreamed of being in the NFL. I remember riding my bike to the school or park and playing with friends or sometimes I would find games with kids I didn’t even know. I loved it so much, I didn’t care if I didn’t know the kids, I wanted to carry the ball. I thought about football all of the time. Even as a boy, I didn’t mind sitting down and watching a whole game.

With the Olympics starting this weekend, there is some excitement in the air. But the real excitement for me is the starting of the football season. Yep, that’s right, I’m excited for it. But that excitement is the beginning of youth football. I never thought I would enjoy watching football as much as I enjoy watching my son play. He happens to be a very good little player and is known by the other coaches and players. This is going to be a different year for him than in the past because he is now in middle school. It is now going to be all about winning for the most part. He won’t be able to take it easy as he has in the past. So now he gets to see what all of the running up and down hills that I have talked him into doing during the off season is all about.

Some of you may be thinking, “where are you going here”? I think a lot of us have been pulled away or even walked away from our first love. It could be a relationship or an activity. It could even be a career that you left for other reasons. Whatever it is, we went in another direction. I walked away from football in high school because I fell in love with motocross. Now, I’m not saying I had a shot at being in the NFL, but I did leave something I dreamed most of my childhood about for something that was more temporary. I understood in high school that I wanted to teach and coach football. But the thing that I walked away from that cost me the most was a relationship with Jesus.

I became a Jesus follower when I was 15, but once I graduated from high school, I decided to pursue wrong relationships and material things and turned my back on my relationship with the Lord. I was reading the book of Revelation a few weeks ago and as I started to think of my first love, I thought of what the apostle John wrote about while he was in prison. In the second chapter of Revelation John is being spoken to by an Angel and telling what the Lord is seeing. He cannot tolerate the wicked and detestable things He is seeing going on towards the end times. He tells John this in Revelation 2:4 “Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love.” The last verse was something I remembered when I finally decided to come back into His grace back in the 80’s.

One thing is for certain, all of us have had some kind of first love. But the important one is Jesus. If you are a person that has walked away from your faith and know that you are not where you need to be, it’s OK to turn back to Him. In the book of Luke 11-32 Jesus gives His parable to describe Heaven with the story of the “Prodigal son”. In this story a man of wealth has two sons, but one wants to leave and asks for his inheritance so he can leave and go do his own thing. But the young man runs out of funds and decides he had it better than he realized. As he turned back home, his father noticed him in the distance and ran to greet him. He told his servants to throw a party for his son, his son had come back home. Just remember that Jesus wants you to come home to Him!