My Idol Worship

Do you have an idol, an image or other material object representing a deity to which religious worship is addressed (Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.). I worshiped basketball but here’s the reason. It’s just like any other god you choose to serve. The god is a symbol of promise, perhaps deliverance and even salvation. If there is hope to be had, it is vitalized by that god. So I worshiped basketball from about age 12-to-oh, uh, hmm- about age 23.

I worshiped basketball because I was afraid of not having an identity, not making a living and well…simply not mattering. I took all the proverbial eggs and placed them in one basket then I took the basket and dangled it from the ledge of a 15-story building…so-to-speak. In other words I gambled my future on the notion that I’d be a good enough athlete to magically vanquish all of my nemeses (i.e. fear, poverty, insecurity, etc.)

I thought that I could prove to people that Norman Coulter Jr. is a force to be reckoned with but the escapade landed me in a mire of depression and aimlessness. Terribly dissatisfied with basketball at age 23, I gave it up all together and what is a man without a god? What is a human, for that matter, without a god to serve? I’ll put it this way: without purpose, our desire to flourish wanes and that’s what happened to me. I worshiped basketball, became a pretty devoted disciple only to find that my idol was lifeless, inanimate and actually incapable of “blessing” me the way I had envisioned. I was not meant to serve a sport but quite the contrary and we do this sort of thing all the time. It’s a love interest, athletics, a job, maybe even a child and our worship of something that can’t be God stifles our ability to truly live. There’s only on God. Beware of false idols.