So Proud

Halfback delay, the way Coach Spera drew it up, was an ingenious 7-man flag football play. The wideout would run a deep route up the middle, sucking the safety and corner in. The backs would line up and hold as if to block. But the inside back was only faking a block. He'd slip out and run a bubble route in the zone the wideout had left.

On that day when I was in 7th grade, we played Atonement, and halfback delay ruined them. The safety turned in, and I'm not sure the defense even saw me, the littlest kid in my class, faking a block and then slipping into the flat.

Once I had the ball in my hands, it didn't matter how close they were. At that instant, I was my father, who played football from when he was a kid all the way through college, who told me he'd run a fly pattern and know "no one could catch me." No one was going to catch me. 90 yards. No one was going to catch me. At the endzone, for a flicker of a second, I was something older than me, sharing a moment of electric communion with victors past. I was my father, I was Jesse Owens in Berlin. I was Odysseus triumphantly returning home.

You've seen athletes experience it today, and you wonder why they're so jubilant. If it's a show. Maybe for some, but most are trying to explain that moment of oneness that is older than anything in their experience.

This is what God has given us - a chance to experience something that defies our experience and memory. An idea of more beyond what we can recall or prove. I look at my beloved and I am awed. Smitten. I am Jacob, his eyes fixed on Rachel. Tristan and Romeo. Shakespeare refining a word to a meter only he knows. I am dancing a dance older than me, a love old as time.

And truthfully, it can be a painful dance. I have been Judas. David, murdering to sate a lust. Peter denying his friend and teacher. It's an equally electric moment, and as old as Adam.

My mom wrote me a note when I went off to college. It was just a line. "Greg, we are so proud."

I look at my daughter on her 42nd day. Trisomy 18 babies don't live. She woke up early this morning and decided living was worth fighting for. She has a hole in her heart and an extra chromosome that bludgeon her, weaken her every day. But today, she is her grandfather, fighting cancer, rising and deciding life is worth living for. She is her great grandfather, awake in a prison camp with encephalitis and deciding that life is worth living for.

And I am my mother. I am God, looking down at his child and telling her and anyone who'll listen that I AM WELL PLEASED. Look at her. Look at her. That's my kid. I am so proud.