Joe Gibbs Turns to Job
And, in my opinion, it's never a good sign when your football coach starts quoting Job in his weekely spiritual gameplan. But actually, Gibbs looked a lot better this week than he did last week.
The subtitle for today's episode was "How to walk boldly forward through tough times in life." That's been something of a theme this season; this is actually the second use of "tough times" in a subtitle. A different subtitle also used the phrase "difficult times." Other episodes have dealt with "Keeping the Proper Perspective," Letting God Handle Our Messes and "How to overcome the struggles that confront us at work!!!" In fact, you could pretty much figure out the team's record just by looking at the titles of Gibbs's weekly spiritual messages.
If I counted correctly, Gibbs used the word "tough" and its derivations nine times today. And there were more than a few lines about how hard this season has been.
"This has not been a pretty picture," Gibbs said.
Mister Snyder and the fans are "all doing their job, and it seems like, to me, when this happens to me and we lose football games, I'm not doing mine, I'm letting them down," Gibbs said.
"The tough things about being a football coach is that millions of people get to see whether you win or lose, and when you lose, millions of people are kind of looking at that," Gibbs said.
"Right now, for me, I've gotta tell you, it hurts," Gibbs said.
"And when I go through a period of time like this, I hurt," Gibbs said.
All this pain led to a discussion of doubt and faith, and hence the above reference to Job. Gibbs also referred to passages in Luke, Mark and Matthew that deal with doubt, especially Mark 9:20-24, about overcoming "unbelief." And doubt, Gibbs said, is actually a sin. And so, he summarized, you must constantly be in church and with other believers, studying the Word and staying close to God, increasing your faith and keeping doubt away.
"And I hope I kind of could give you a feeling of how bad I'm hurtin'," Gibbs concluded. "And yet I know, hey, God loves me more than I love my children and my grandchildren. I'm claiming that, and God, I'm going to be praying to Him all day today, I'm just going to say to You, God, increase my faith."
By Dan Steinberg |
November 2, 2006; 12:35 PM ET
| Category:
Redskins
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Posted by: Kim | November 2, 2006 12:57 PM
I think you better be careful about how much mocking you do about this topic. Not everyone thinks being religious (whatever religion) is so high-larious
Posted by: afro nation | November 2, 2006 10:31 PM
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Gibbs has turned to the one book that's bigger than the Skins playbook: The Bible.