It was a big weekend. We’d planned it for weeks. Blair, John Samuel, and Carson were all coming home for opening weekend of the SEC football season. It’s just something we really enjoy doing together. We were pumped for football and all the welcomed indulgences of our beloved fall that come along with it. 

I’d taken food requests and bought the groceries. These people eat a lot of food and so the football food is just as important as the football game. I was making white chicken chili, ribs, smoked chicken sliders, fruit, and all manner of chips and requested hot dips. Blair, our baker, was bringing a carrot cake and an apple pie to satisfy the sweet tooth. I’d also bought Blair’s fall flavored coffees, Carson’s favorite cereals, and John Samuel’s Bubly drinks- like any good mother would do. For us, when cool weather, good food, family, and football all come together, well, it makes us downright giddy. 

Now, being a Mississippi State football fan can lead to high levels of frustration during the course of an average year, so when you see you’re opening the season playing the national champs, well, you keep expectations quite low. So low, in fact, that you resign yourself to lose badly, but plan to enjoy the atmosphere of food and fellowship, and relish the sounds of the season regardless. That’s where we were on Saturday before the game. 

Just before game time, I attended the funeral of a lovely lady at our church. She’d had a difficult struggle with cancer and her body had finally succumbed to the terrible disease. She was always such an encourager to me in my blogging and I was so sad that her light was taken from us. The preacher told about all the mission programs in our community that she had jump started. Some of them, I had no idea were born from her heart. She’d invested so much in people in all sorts of situations and from all kinds of backgrounds- sharing God’s love with them in word and in action. I looked around the crowded church and could see people who were touched by those efforts. Lasting impacts of a life well-invested. 

We got home and I got out of my black dress and into my comfy maroon and white. Blair had the game day food ready and we parked ourselves in front of the TV with our mounded plates. We were the first to score. Then we kept them from scoring, but a seasoned State fan knows not to even think about getting excited until much later in the game. It’s a defense mechanism which has served us well across the ages. 

Well, they’d score and then we would. Back and forth into the 4th quarter- long after the wheels usually fall off the bus and we go careening into the ditch. But, we were still ahead. There was cautious optimism as we waited on the team to blow it at the end, but they never did. We won. The Bulldogs beat the national champs away from home in the season opener with a new coach. We jumped and screamed and hugged and acted like idiots, really. 

The rest of the night, we read articles and laughed at memes and listened to all those post game shows and interviews around the fire pit. We got back into the food and were enjoying the afterglow of the unexpected victory. The poll predictions, the ecstatic players, all the buzz. It was nuts.

After everyone else went to bed, I was thinking about how I’d shared in two different kinds of victories in that one day. There are the world’s victories which are loud and showy but like a flash in the pan. Big, prominent, and seen by almost everyone, but likely to burn out quickly and be replaced by another headliner before week’s end. They garner a lot of attention and are widely celebrated, but their real impact is pretty shallow and short-lived. 

But, then, there are heaven’s victories. The kind we’d celebrated at the funeral. Those are gained by people who belong to God and quietly invest their lives into the places where there is need or pain or where souls are lost. They’re rarely noticed by the masses or heralded on the airwaves, but their impacts are so much deeper and are forever felt. As humans, we get caught up in the big and showy triumphs, but the most beautiful things happen off in the distance. Away from the noise and crowds is where the biggest victories are won and the most lasting impacts are made. When the hands of ordinary people work out the call that God has placed in their hearts. 

Like Ellen.