Fabrice, Fulfillment and Faith

The third weekend of March was a truly memorable one for sport in this part of South Wales.  75,000 people packed the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, and many more sat on the edge of their barstools or sofas as Wales surged to their third Grand Slam in eight years.  National rejoicing followed! For some of us, though, this was only the second most important sporting achievement of the weekend.  Far more important in some eyes was the fact that Newport County Football Club, in their centenary year, had reached a Wembley final, and will grace the national stage with their particular brand of the beautiful game on May 12^th. Joy unconfined in the house of this writer!

But whether your ball is round or oval, it all seemed unimportant by the end of the evening.  For at a football ground in North London, a 23 year-old footballer, Fabrice Muamba, had suddenly collapsed during a game watched by 35,000 fans and live television cameras.  In a moment he had gone from being the fittest of athletes to fighting for his life.  The nation held its breath … and turned, it seems, to prayer!

As the TV cameras understandably gave the seriously ill footballer some privacy and turned their focus onto the crowd, people could be seen with their eyes closed and their hands together – school assembly like!  As the evening wore on, famous footballers, England captains amongst them, urged us by tweets to pray.  Why was this?  Has secular England found God?  Has the national game been gripped by a religious revival?

Probably not, I fear.  Maybe it was more a question of ‘if everything else fails, try prayer’.  But these events do show up, perhaps, the truth of what the Bible claims. The Word of God tells us that “God … has put eternity in their hearts” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).  Deep down in all of us there is an awareness of the eternal; that there is something beyond this world.  Though we deny it with secularism, or drown it with the chase for fame, wealth and pleasure, it is still there.  It is a yawning chasm in our lives that only God can fill.  And when the crisis comes, that gap seems all the larger.

Maybe that is where you are in your life just now.  Perhaps you have tried everything but still can’t find fulfillment.  Or maybe there is a crisis in your life which has caused you to stop and evaluate things afresh.  Maybe something has reminded you too of the frailty and uncertainty of human life.

The good news of course is that God does here and answer prayer.  As I write this Fabrice Muamba is making a recovery that one of the doctors who treated him described as ‘miraculous’.  We pray that he continues to improve.  Another writer in the Bible said “In my distress I called upon the LORD, and cried out to my God: He heard my voice from His temple, and my cry came before Him, even to His ears” (Psalm 18:6).

Not only does God do that, but He has sent the answer to human frailty and failure. He gave us Jesus, His Son, who took frail human flesh Himself.  Jesus Christ came and willingly died, crucified on a cruel Roman cross.  Through Him we can know God, and knowing God have forgiveness, fulfillment and eternal life.  Never mind sport; that really is something to get excited about!