I grew up in a family that took absolutely no interest in football. There were several different football codes that our family seriously did not follow. At primary school I briefly played Aussie rules until a bad ankle injury put a stop to that. In early adulthood I played soccer for a church team for a few years.
However, in the mid-1960s I married into a family that were mad keen Hawthorn supporters. Their passion for, what was then, the Victoria Football League (VFL) was an education. If the Hawks won on Saturday I could be sure of having a great day at my fiancé’s home on the following Sunday. But if they lost it was a different story. There would be the endless recriminations and post mortems of the game and why they believed the Ref needed glasses. My in-law family had ten kids so it’s easy to imagine the lively footy banter that went on around the Sunday dinner table.
Fast forward a few years and you would have found my own new family living less than a kilometre from Geelong’s Cardinia Park football ground. On many a Saturday we could hear the roar of the crowd from our home and fans would clog our street to park their cars. It was hard not to get caught up in the football fever. Of course I had another reason for beginning to take an interest in The Geelong Cats – somebody had to stand up to the in-laws and their ferocious support for The Hawks. So it was always a great delight when I could phone the in-laws and pass on my commiserations at the defeat of The Hawks by The Cats. All of that came back to me a few days ago when I read of the final retirement of Geelong mid-fielder, Garry Ablett Jnr after the 2020 Grand Final.
What is perhaps less well known than Ablett’s astonishing football achievements is the story of his conversion to Christianity.
In 2005 Ablett was 21 and living in a share house with a group of five friends in Torquay, south west of Melbourne. His football career was taking off, but behind the scenes his private life was unravelling.
In an autobiography that he has written he tells how in the early hours of one morning he woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. He particularly struggled with three issues. In tears he prayed, “God, if you’re real I need your help because I’m really struggling.” Ablett tells how being now wide awake he got out of bed. He turned on the television but before he could change channels, one of the very early-morning religious programs caught his attention because it was dealing with one of the the very issues that had kept him awake. When that program finished Ablett was flabbergasted by the fact that the next religious program, that followed the first, focused on another of three issues that Ablett was particularly grappling with. To his utter amazement a third program touched on the third issue in his life. This experience made Ablett aware, not only that God was real but that this God cared about him.
After that night he began studying the Bible, rejoined the church and started living a life with Christian values.
On one occasion people were leaving Jesus because He was saying some hard things. Jesus asked his disciples if they wanted to leave too. Peter replied, “Lord, to whom shall we go, you alone have the words of eternal life.” That’s the point isn’t it? It’s the Words of Jesus that transform and bring life. It has happened so often that God blows someone away by some amazing experiences. That was true for footy player, Garry Ablett jnr. And I could tell you stories of many others who were pulled up by similar God-moments. But we need more than mind-blowing experiences. We also especially need to be grounded in the Scriptures because, as Scripture says, “Faith comes by the hearing of the Word.” And that too was true for Garry Ablett Jnr, just as it has been for countless others.
John Westendorp