Everybody Needs a Gridiron

I don’t remember exactly when I first heard the word gridiron, but I’m pretty sure it was on a Sunday afternoon while playing tackle football with my nine rough and rowdy cousins.

I was probably barefoot. I always felt a little scrappier that way. I could dig my toes beneath those wiry Bermuda grass roots and into the sandy loam of central Louisiana. It was all about traction—or at least that’s what I told myself.

Mike and Gary talked of possibly getting an all-expenses-paid trip to Vietnam. Jimmy’s trunk lid was raised, providing the music and ambiance for the first weekend of fall, all synonymous with family football.  And, of course, there was smack-talk. That’s where the game really started.

If you couldn’t win the trash-talk war by being louder and more offensive, then you had to appear smarter—especially when it came to LSU football. If you could spit out a statistic about Bert Jones, mention Coach Stovall, or repeat something you had overheard an uncle say about Billy Cannon at the after-church potluck dinner, you had established some credibility.

I remember one Sunday afternoon as if it were yesterday, when one of my older cousins introduced a new word into the banter.

“It’s good to be back on the gridiron.” I heard them say. 

What the heck is a gridiron? I’m not sure they even knew, and no one dared ask. There was far too much young testosterone floating around in that converted cow pasture for somebody to admit he didn’t know what a word meant. So we all nodded affirmatively and kept playing.

Years later, I finally learned what a gridiron really was.

Early American football fields were marked differently than the ones we know today. Lines ran not only across the field but lengthwise as well, creating a series of squares. From above, the field resembled the crosshatched surface of an old cooking grate—a gridiron. When you look at the history of football, you find out those markings eventually disappeared, along with some other things we could talk about later. But the name didn’t. Somewhere along the way I realized something else:

Way before I knew what a gridiron was, I had already been on one.

In fact, several of them.

Some I chose.

Some I built.

And some were delivered to me by life.

My conclusion?

Everybody needs a gridiron.

We all need something in our lives that gives us lines.

Parameters.

Boundaries.

A place where we know what’s in bounds and what’s out.

Without some lines in life, it becomes remarkably easy to convince ourselves that wandering is progress.

Good boundaries don’t imprison us; they tell us where the field is.

We also need something that keeps score.

Not because life is one giant contest, and certainly not because everything that matters can be reduced to wins and losses. But there ought to be some places in our lives where progress can be measured.

Am I becoming a better husband? A better father? A better friend? Am I more disciplined than I was a year ago? More generous? More faithful? More honest? More useful?

A scoreboard may occasionally bruise our ego, but it also has a way of telling the truth.

Then we need something—or someone—that pushes back.

That may be the most important part of the gridiron.

We need challenge. Resistance. Competition. Somebody who refuses to simply let us run untouched toward the end zone.

Sometimes that person is an opponent. Sometimes it is a friend. Sometimes it is a coach. Sometimes it is a difficult season of life that lines up directly across from us and says, “If you’re gonna go forward, you gotta go through me.”

Resistance isn’t always our enemy.

Muscles grow because something pushes against them. Skills improve because somebody challenges them. Ideas become clearer when somebody questions them. Character develops when doing the right thing costs us something. Even joy can increase when something worthwhile has been hard-earned.

And every now and then, the route to success starts flat on our back. I’ve learned quite a bit standing on my feet. I’ve probably learned more trying to get back on them.

Failure has taught me things success never bothered to mention.

Opposition has exposed weaknesses I would have gladly ignored. Difficult people have revealed things in me that easy relationships allowed me to hide.

That doesn’t mean every hardship is good. It means hardship can be used for good and eventually make us better. 

Perhaps that is why the people who make the greatest difference in our lives aren’t always the ones cheering from the stands. Sometimes they are the ones standing across the line from us. Sometimes they wear the same jersey we do but care enough to challenge us. They push us, question us, confront us, encourage us, and occasionally irritate the living daylights out of us.

And somehow, we become better.

Everybody needs something that marks the lines, keeps the score, pushes back, and occasionally knocks us on our butt.

Everybody needs a gridiron.

Maybe the wise man Solomon understood that long before football ever existed:

“As iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend.”
— Proverbs 27:17

Apparently, the Good Lord never intended for us to become everything we could become standing alone in an open field.

We need some lines.

We need some teammates.

We need a little resistance.

And every once in a while, we need somebody or something lined up across from us who makes us dig our toes a little deeper into the ground. 

Everybody needs a Gridiron.