ACC Tournament

I love college basketball. It's about the only sport I get excited about being a spectator. On occasion, there's a good football game. Baseball and hockey games are fun to attend. But, college basketball is so much fun! The ACC tournament wasn't pretty, but it was exciting. UNC lost in the final by a lot (17 points), but it's okay because the past two times we've lost in the final we went on to win the NCAA tournament. Woohoo! We're a really young team with a sick amount of raw talent, but we play messy.

UNC's first two games were studies in double digit comebacks. I was struck by how evident momentum is in a game, and how it shifts from team to team. It seemed like a metaphor for life. It's beautiful when it's your team that goes on a 12-0 streak, but it's infuriating when it's the other way around. Sometimes everything is going the way you want it to, and there are other times when you get stopped by all eight stoplights. There are bad calls. But, a player has to stay in the game. A commentator said he liked how Harrison Barnes was willing himself into the game. I need to talk to my students about this "willing himself into the game", and I need to remind myself of it too in my job search and life in general. I stopped running because I was sick, but now I've got to make up the lost time and get myself back to where I was.

As for the job search, I was really struck by this passage when reading Hebrews this morning, "Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders us and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross.... Consider him... so that you will not grow weary and lose heart." In this, there's a since of order, but it seems like Jesus as author has a very different perspective on my life than I do. There's an awful lot of references to the cross and suffering and perseverance; it's enough to make a believer a little nervous. But, maybe it's like UNC basketball, it's okay to lose the conference championship because it spurs you on to win the National.