Sunday, June 22, 2008

Prayer and NASCAR

The one thing about this blog is it will cover a variety of sports. One of those being racing. This post is one that I've been mulling over for months and with it being kind of a "quiet time" in sports, I figured this was the best time to break it out.

I grew up in the South. With that, I grew up with NASCAR. Some of my fondest memories growing up was listening to a race on the radio as I was coming home from worship at church on Sunday afternoon and then watching the race on TV with my dad in the den. I know, to some people racing is not a sport. I tend to think it is. To be able to drive 500 miles in the span of a few hours with all the pressure takes something that few people have. When I was little, I did dream about being a stock car driver. To this day, when I'm back home on some of those back country roads, I drive like I'm racing at Daytona.

The last couple of years (probably three years) I didn't watch much racing. But moving to Kansas City (and with no cable), I got hooked watching it while it was on Fox. And one of the things I immediately noticed was how for every pre-race event, they had an invocation or prayer. And it wasn't just some 'prayer' that didn't really go to God but they had chaplins or pastors there who actually prayed in the name of Jesus. And I thought about this for a while and how rare that is. Now at some high school football games or such they still do prayer but there is no major sporting event other than NASCAR that does. As much grief as NASCAR gets about being a "redneck" sport, I'm glad that it still keeps that as part of the tradition.

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