Giants running back Brandon Jacobs has this message for fans: professional football players don’t care about your fantasy team. The two-time Super Bowl winner lashed back at the fantasy football community last Thursday when a fan tweeted it would be “over for you and yo family” if Jacobs failed to rush for at least 50 yards and two touchdowns against the Minnesota Vikings.
“Us as football players, we don’t owe y’all nothing,” Jacobs said while expressing that he has no concern with the fantasy needs of online football fanatics.
When the fan replied that his Tweet had merely been in jest, Jacobs found little humor. “When you say stuff like that and think it’s a joke, it’s a problem.”
Jacobs was justified in his response, and this immature fan exposed the growing trend in our post-modern world that fanciful things take on far too much unwarranted importance. Fantasy sports aren’t the only example of “virtual reality,” with sites like Second Life and online gaming providing users with their own versions of alternate realities.
Over the last 10 years, 36 million accounts were created on Second Life, and $3.6 billion was spent on virtual assets. The total equivalent time users spent on Second Life is 217,266 years.
Our generation is easily carried away with false priorities. We don’t all live on the Second Life grid or publicly threaten the family of a fantasy football star, but we certainly place too much value on things that shouldn’t captivate our time.
Our student routine often includes posting Vines and reading inane blog posts, while we may think we have no time to pray with a hurting roommate or buy coffee for a stressed friend.
In as many words, Luke 12:34 sums up the issue with the well-known verse “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” We would do well to ask ourselves if there is any treasure to be found in our current priorities. Why do we do what we do, and is it worthy of our God-given time and attention?
As Christians, we need to guard our hearts and emotions from things that don’t matter. By treasuring our relationship with God and His gifts to us, we can protect ourselves from wrong priorities, and perhaps if people invested more into their “first life,” there would be no need to add a second.
