Spiritual Lessons Learned by Sucking at Fantasy Football

So my fantasy football team sucks.

This in and of itself would not be interesting blog material (note to all fellow fantasy footballers out there: no one outside of your league cares to hear you grouse or cheer your fantasy team) except that I'm learning a significant spiritual lessons along the way.

For the un-initiated, fantasy football is building your own hypothetical team with actual football players. When they gain yards or score touchdowns in their games, your team gets points.

It's not just this year that my team sucks. I've been playing for over fifteen years and generally my teams year in and year out are mediocre.

I'm an above average fan in terms of general knowledge. But I've been playing in a league of really sharp guys for most of the past eight years. They're great guys, and they generally kick my butt.

I haven't always responded kindly to my mediocrity. Several years ago I realized that I was obsessing over my team all Sunday afternoon and smarting from my losses all day on Monday. I realized I was over-competitive and my team was bad--a bad combination. I quit the league mid-season and took a couple year hiatus to re-gain perspective.

This fall my team has descended into an even more radical form of mediocrity than is typical of my mid-season swoon. And I've been trying to figure out how to still enjoy it.

So I've been practicing a spiritual discipline in regards to my fantasy football team that those who are more deep in the life of the Spirit have always encouraged: detachment.

Detachment is a way of relating to the world not in an apathetic way but in a way that recognizes the things of the world for what they are: fleeting, transient. Situations, promotions, discouragements, wealth, poverty, status, stuff, power, and yes, even fantasy football glory or rancid-ness--all these things are shifting shadows, they pass.

God never changes. And so the practice of detachment focuses on the eternal God and allows that to inform and re-shape how we relate to things that so easily capture our imaginations that are, in fact, so very trivial.

In detachment we are invited to enter into and enjoy things for what they actually are, not as the world would hype them up to be, not as we would wish them to be, not as the various pressures and circumstances and situations around us would make them out to be. We handle them with love, with grace, and with freedom to let them go when the time comes.

This is so very, very, very, very not my nature. My nature is to dig in, to take whatever's in front of me and make it my whole world and try to make it great. And sometimes those instincts rob me of joy and cause me to overly-invest in things that aren't worth over-investing in.

So my fantasy football team sucks. And I'm trying to enjoy it anyway. It's not easy. This week I scored the lowest overall point total for anyone all season long. I still hate losing, and I hate losing embarrassingly badly even worse.

But if it helps me to live a little more freely, both with this game and in the rest of my life, maybe, just maybe, it's actually worth it.