A few years back, I was introduced to Fantasy football. Suddenly, I found myself with a vested interest in every game, not just the one in which my team was playing. But it came at a cost. Fantasy sports completely altered the way I watch a game. Instead of rooting for my team to succeed, I ended up rooting for individual players on my roster irrespective of what team they’re on.

This has led to a whole slew of conflicting moments, like when I find myself cheering for certain players on a team to succeed while rooting for others to fail. I’ve even caught myself celebrating when a player on another person’s roster is sidelined because of an injury, completely forgetting that this is a real person and that injury has real life consequences.

Lately, it feels as if we’re approaching life as if it’s all a big game of Fantasy Football. We have divided the world into categories – have’s/have not’s, Democrat/Republican, black/white, citizen/non-citizen. And then we pick sides. This causes us to construct our own roster of players and causes that we root for and others that we root against.

Unfortunately, this leads to all sorts of self-defeating desires: we may find ourselves cheering when a politician stumbles, even though their misstep hurts others and has real life consequences. We may decry certain injustices, but overlook others because to acknowledge them could undermine our side’s grip on the moral high ground or, worse yet, cost us an election. Sometimes we even start to look at people who hold different perspectives than us as the enemy.

The problem with approaching life in this way is that it blinds us to an important truth: there’s only one team. We’re all in this together. 

This is especially true for those who claim to follow Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul said as much to believers living in an equally fractured First Century context: "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28) His point is not to deny our differences or pretend they don't exist. Rather, he reminds us that despite our different cultural, political and socioeconomic backgrounds, our relationship with Jesus supersedes those natural dividing lines. While the world says we are on different teams with conflicting goals, if we're following Jesus then we're on the same team and we've been entrusted with the same goal - to reflect His heart into our fractured world. This means doing what he did: binding up the broken, moving towards the marginalized, praying for those who persecute us and serving others rather than seeking to be served.

I know that it may sound naïve to speak this way. You might be thinking, "That’s not the way the world works! We have competing perspectives that conflict with one another, so the only way to ensure that our values are championed is to do whatever it takes to get our representatives into positions of power, and to speak forcefully enough that our perspective is heard, right?!"

But that’s like a team’s defense publicly criticizing the offense, or the quarterback complaining about the receiving core. It doesn’t help the team succeed against the challenges that they face; instead, it tears a team apart from the inside and weakens their ability to rise to each challenge they face.

That’s certainly what is happening in our country right now. We’ve been blindsided not once but twice, first by COVID-19 and then by a series of racially charged deaths. We’re hurting. And rather than uniting to face these challenges head on, we’ve pointed fingers and blamed one another. We’ve been yelling our heads off, but few of us are willing to stop and listen to another perspective – so the volume and the frustration just continue to grow.

What are the solutions to the myriad problems we face as a society? I don’t know. But I know that we won’t find them when we’re trying to shout over one another to be heard. And if we keep blaming one another instead of working together every time we get blindsided, then before too long we won’t have the strength or the resolve to get back to our feet.

Worse yet, if we keep rooting for one another to fail, eventually we’ll wake up and realize that we’ve all lost. Because we’re on the same team.

"Therefore, let us make every effort to do what leads to
peace and to mutual edification." Romans 14:19