The Gridiron Clock

We're moving headlong into fall now! Labor Day festivities wrapped up yesterday, and football is back. High school games have begun; college pre-conference season games are underway, and the NFL kicks off with a bang as the Super Bowl-winning Denver Broncs host the Carolina Panthers at Mile High Stadium this Thursday night.

I always wanted to play football when I was a kid. I dreamed of being the star running back on the team, my name echoing out over the loudspeakers as I ran for touchdown after touchdown. But there was one problem to this pipedream: I was thin and scrawny. Consequently, I ended up on the sidelines, playing tuba in the marching band. Only later did I learn that for every glorious minute on the field the football team spent hours grinding through practice and working out.

The guys on the football team and those of us in the marching band took our separate paths. Each day we both practiced, honing our respective skills. But Friday nights we came together, each ready to take the field in his or her own time, bringing glory to our school, and a little to ourselves. Even now, on Friday nights when I drive by a high school and see the stadium lights and hear the drums pounding, it takes me back.

Life seems cyclical, doesn't it? These days I find myself in a somewhat similar situation with my son. He's finished high school now and is in college. I'd love to be there with him, enjoying all his experiences -- the struggles as well as the triumphs. But both of us have a different path to take: I'm off to work each day, while he's pushing through his college course load and forging plans for his future.

Like the marching band and the football team, we'll end up doing our stuff apart, in the future. But I can encourage him from the sidelines with my thoughts and prayers. I'll look forward to those game times when I can take my place on the sidelines, and cheer him on.

But life presses on, and the chances are not far from slim that I may not be there for some of his greater achievements, especially if they happen later in his life. The differences in our ages being the determining factor on that issue.

Football with its start in the late summer-early fall of the year has a way of marking in our minds that sense of transition we feel with the changing seasons. In fact, the next Men's NetWork blog you'll read will be one day short of the first day of autumn. How quickly time flies. How helpless we are to do anything about it.

How do you feel as you watch your children "spring up" before your very eyes? Do you have any special or innovative ways of staying a part of their lives, especially as they move beyond your household?

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