The Game You Almost Didn’t Go To

You almost didn’t go.

The weather was wrong or the team was struggling or the week was hard or it would have been very easy to watch from home or just skip it entirely. And then you went anyway. And something happened at that game — or because of that game, or in the company of the people you went with — that would not have happened if you had stayed home.

The game you almost didn’t go to is often the one that matters most.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

Not giving up meeting together. The writer of Hebrews is talking about the gathered community of faith — but the principle applies anywhere genuine community forms around a shared thing. The gathering that requires a decision to show up, rather than the default of staying home, is the gathering that most often produces something that the home version doesn’t.

The experience of sport is genuinely different in person than it is on a screen. Not always better in the sense of comfort or convenience. Different in the sense of real — the sound, the shared breath of the crowd, the way a big moment lands in a room full of people who are feeling it simultaneously. Something is produced in the communal experience of sport that the individual consumption of it cannot replicate.

The game you almost didn’t go to also tends to produce the stories. The improbable win you witnessed in person. The conversation you had in the parking lot. The moment your child’s face did something in the stands that you would have missed on the couch. Presence has a way of producing the things that become the memories. The times you showed up when you didn’t have to are disproportionately represented in the things you will actually remember.

The specific memory is the evidence for the principle. Let it surface.