You Can't Go Home Again

by Tom Pappas

This is the time of year that lots of Nebraskans get a little weird because of their hopes for the football season.  It really matters to us as a state how Big Red does.

I’ll start with a brief, personal 49-year History of Husker Football. The coach I played for in 1963 maneuvered the Huskers to national prominence.  His successor (an assistant) developed stability and excellence and achieved 3 national titles. One of my teammates (an assistant) valiantly tried to continue the tradition but experienced slippage and was removed as coach. An outsider was brought in from the NFL and attempted to remake the program but failed grandly. The current coach is guiding Huskers back on course but it will never be exactly the same as before.

There are times during those five coaching eras when it seemed that the Huskers were as good as they ever could be. Even during mediocre seasons, some of the players were playing as well as any player ever could.

Isn’t that how it is with the life of faith?  Especially in the up-times we imagine there must be a way to bookmark what we’re doing and keep it like that always. But often, in the down-times, there are triumphs, and we have that solid feeling that with God’s help it can be done and that’s just fine.

Many Husker fans desperately want the “Glory Years” back; but you can’t go back. Many Christians want their church or Christian experience restored to the way it was how they best remember it.

Over the years I have heard the phrase “You can’t go home again”. Last spring in North Carolina, I learned the fascinating story (especially for English majors) about Thomas Wolfe’s background and why felt he couldn’t return to Ashville.

Wolfe was advised by his mother not to return to Ashville because he named names in Look Homeward Angel. In many cases what he wrote wasn’t complimentary. Eight years later he was  greeted as a celebrity and the people who were maddest at him were those not included in his book. His next title was You Can’t Go Home Again. There is wisdom embedded in that phrase.

Don’t try to “go home again”; it’s different now. The Huskers of the 90’s were for that decade; successful Husker football won’t be a clone of the ‘90s. More importantly, who among us would limit God by hoping for the old thing, when God’s new best thing is waiting to become our reality.

The Call to Coach by Doug Wysockey-Johnson

Coaches are in the news these days for all the wrong reasons.  We are sickened and angry to hear about the coach at Penn State who betrayed the trust of some young boys.  It is easy to feel cynical and even suspicious about coaches these days.

At this time I think it is especially important to hear about a different coach, a coach who is called to coach for all the right reasons.  Joe Erhmann was an All-American at Syracuse and an NFL star for the Baltimore Colts.  Since then he has been a high school football coach and a minister.  Speaking about the crimes at Penn State, this is what one coach had to say to other coaches:

Moral courage is what sustains the basic freedoms and responsibilities of life in community; we belong to each other; we need each other; we affect each other.  What is painfully missing in this horrific story at Penn State is the lack of moral courage displayed by men who spent a lifetime in education, leadership, sports, coaching and working with young people.  Courage can be divided into two types: physical and moral.  Of the two however, physical courage is the more recognized virtue in the world of sports.  Coaches talk about physical courage, encourage it, and hold up examples to the team often in the context of fighting through injuries, rehabilitation, and pain.  There is far too little emphasis, teaching, modeling, nurturing and developing of moral courage.
                                                                        Blog, Nov. 14, 2011

Joe Erhmann coached high school football for years. He wanted to win, and his teams did win quite often.  But the mission was much larger.  He wanted to help his boys become men. Here is how he defines masculinity:

Masculinity, first and foremost, ought to be defined in terms of relationships.  It ought to be taught in term of the capacity to love and to be loved.  At the end of your life, it is going to come down to this:  What kind of father were you?  What kind of husband were you?  What kind of coach or teammate were you?  What kind of son were you” What kind of friend were you?

And I think the second criterion—the only other criterion for masculinity—is that all of us ought to have some kind of cause, some kind of purpose in our lives that’s bigger than our own individual hopes, dreams, wants, and desires.  At the end of our life, we ought to be able to look back over it from our deathbed and know that somehow the world was a better place because we lived, we loved, we were other-centered, other -focused.
                                                Seasons of Life by Jeffrey Marx

Even in this discouraging time, I am thankful for coaches.  I am grateful for the people in my life that took the time to be my coach.  I am grateful for the coaches that today take the time to lead my son and daughter.

And I am grateful for people like Joe Erhmann for whom coaching is a call with a larger mission than to win games.

Who was your favorite coach?