Christian club's annual outreach focuses on vocation

The room fell silent as the speaker announced this statistic: Within three years of leaving the league, 85 percent of NFL players are divorced or bankrupt.

“An old but true statistic,” said Frank Reich, the current wide receivers coach for the Indianapolis Colts.

He said most NFL players get into the game at a very young age. In time, their lives are overtaken by football. For a long time nothing else in life but the game matters. Leaving the league reveals the problem.

On March 10, more than 300 students braved the heavy downpour to listen to three men speak at Assembly Hall. For its annual outreach event, Campus Crusade for Christ invited Reich, current Colts Chaplain Ken Johnson and Shawn Harper, who played for seven years in the NFL, to share their stories.

“If your identity is in your vocation, then that’s where it’s going to lead you,” Reich said. “It’s deciding what you’re going to let define your life.”

The message of the event was to know one’s goal in life, to know what one is aiming for. Should people be satisfied upon achieving money and fame, or are their lives worth more than that? It is about scoring the right goals, about winning at the game of life.
 
Reich is a former NFL quarterback for teams like the New York Jets and the Detroit Lions, but he also played basketball in high school. He told the story of how once, at a big game, he shot the ball into the wrong net. Reich’s girlfriend at that time was present at the game. The crucial point came when they shared an “intimate gaze,” causing Reich to make the fatal mistake.

“I took my eyes off the goal, what I was meant to do, and that cost me.” Reich said he constantly reminds himself of his purpose in the game of life. He said football used to mean everything to him. Then he met his wife’s cancer-stricken friend, who forced him to re-evaluate his plans.

“Who is on your team with you? Who gives you meaning? Who lets you know you can keep on keeping on?” Reich said.

Head of the CRU outreach team, junior Wesley Terry, said he is thankful so many people showed up.

“We figured the rain killed us a little bit,” Terry said. “It’s an opportunity to try and appeal to the campus and give the Gospel message out to as many people as possible ... at one time.”

Freshman Lyndi Hollis, who attends CRU meetings regularly, said she likes how the event was set up.

“I liked that they shared the Gospel straight up,” Hollis said. “In college we’re all wrapped up in getting good grades, career, our future ... We need to stop and remember that next to God, none of it matters.”

As IU alumnus Harper quoted Matthew 6:33, he said he understands how college students tend to view life through a limited lens of knowledge and intellect, but “using your intellect when it comes to Christ is like comparing a professor to a toddler.”
 
He advised college students to lead a humble lifestyle and seek what is beyond worldly values and treasures that are temporal.

“I wash feet,” Johnson said, referring to the Biblical story of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet as an act of humility. “And you know what? Sometimes feet stink. But you just show up anyway.”

Johnson said he was raised in a broken home. As a college student, he said he was extremely racist against white students. The turning point came when, playing for the school team, he befriended a white quarterback.

The quarterback looked past “my stupidity and past my pigmentation — and loved me,” Johnson said.

That was when Johnson said he made the decision to “live real,” to pursue the things that really matter.

Start with the end in mind, Johnson said. Every setback is a chance for comeback. God is “not calling you to be perfect. Only in Christ can you be perfect,” he said.

Harper closed the session retelling the Gospel with an analogy of a computer, its operating system and a virus.

“One thing you can’t argue is a changed life,” he said.

Harper praised mankind for the many achievements during the last 10 years but claimed that there is one frontier we have tried time and again, and are unable to conquer: the human condition.

Senior Michael Goodpaster, who manages sound for CRU meetings, agreed with Harper.

“Even though the man can bend a frying pan with his bare hands or tear a telephone book in half, he is still only human,” Goodpaster said. “As a society, we place professional athletes on a pedestal. We hold them up to a standard of perfection. Even ‘perfect people’ can fail like us. We kind of forget that sometimes. We all make mistakes,” Goodpaster said, referring to Harper’s stunts at the beginning of
the program.