Biola University
Coach and Dr. Ed Uszynski (Ph.D.) is back on the podcast to speak with Tim and Mike about the current state of things in youth sports, and they spotlight what’s going on with the parents. Why do parents get embarrassed when their child makes a mistake on the field? Is a parent justified in getting angry when a referee’s call doesn’t go their way? Can parents approach youth sports as an opportunity for spiritual formation and invite God into the game? Today’s conversation explores these questions and more, and they draw from Away Game, a book Ed co-authors with Brian Smith, to help foster a love for youth sports without getting swept into the insanity and incivility at youth sporting events.
Transcript
Tim Muehlhoff: Welcome to the Winsome Conviction Podcast. My name is Tim Muehlhoff. I'm the senior director of the Winsome Conviction Project for five years now. We've attempted to expand discourse, not close it, add some gentleness, add some kindness, qualities that we feel Christ would advocate. And we've been doing this now for five years. This podcast has been part of it the entire time. Thank you for your listening. And as you know, we have co-hosts. Usually, it's Dr. Rick Langer, but Dr. Mike Ahn has joined us today. Mike is the Dean of Spiritual Development at Biola University, La Mirada, California. And he also is the co-director of Winsome Conviction Project and heads up the Pomona dialogues, where we put into practice the things that we believe. For the last five years, we've brought students from Pomona College, a very liberal, progressive college, and they come to our campus, we go to their campus, and we're pleasantly surprised how much we can actually talk to each other. And Mike has done great leadership. So Mike, thank you for joining me.
Mike Ahn: Tim, it's always great to see your face.
Tim Muehlhoff: Thank you. I appreciate that. I've been thinking as I've been watching basketball. I've been watching the WNBA a little bit, and here's what I've noticed watching it. The trash-talking is nonstop, and it's physical. And the berating of referees. Now listen, Caitlin Clark is amazing. She has transformed women's sports, and I think she's all of 23?
Mike Ahn: Maybe.
Tim Muehlhoff: Maybe 23. She might be 22. So listen, kudos for her for having the weight of the world on her shoulders, right? But she trash-talks referees nonstop, and this was true in college too.
Mike Ahn: It's part of the game right now.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah, it's part of the game right now. So we did an episode with Dr. Ed Uszynski, who is our go to person in areas of race, but he's also an expert when it comes to sports ministries. And we did a great segment. You can go back to our archives and find it about... We made the argument that if you want to see incivility really at work, most of us would tend to think, oh, well then we're talking obviously politics, right? Capitol Hill and all the craziness that's happening. We made the argument that no, rather, I think it's happening in youth sports. And then you and I both shared examples, but you're in a unique position because you are not only a parent of kids who are currently competing, but you're also a coach.
Mike Ahn: Yeah. Yeah. So again, just on a rec level, so nothing too intense, but man, you see everything. You see parents, you see referees. Referees are scared to blow the whistle one way.
Tim Muehlhoff: Right.
Mike Ahn: You see, kids feel the pressure a certain way. But man, the incivility and the pressure that kids are feeling. But you know, Tim, I wonder if there's actually a different conversation here. It's actually not... Man, parents, we're bringing so much into this. We bring so many expectations and so many desires, and I'm not sure we're actually seeing what we are bringing into the picture of youth sports. I'd love to ask Ed about what that would look like.
Tim Muehlhoff: Ed Uszynski's our go-to guy when it comes to race. He's written a book called Untangling Critical Race Theory, which, honestly, I have said, and I mean this, is one of the best books I've read in the last 20 years. It is a brilliant, nuanced dive into the issue of race and critical race theory, but he is not a one-trick pony. I first knew him through Athletes in Action, campus crusade for Christ sports ministry is how we got to know each other. So Dr. Uszynski is an author, speaker, sports minister with over three decades experience discipling college and professional athletes. He's written articles, essays, training manuals at the intersection of faith and sport, and is the lead strategist for content mercenaries. He has two theological degrees, one from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and a PhD in American culture studies from Bowling Green State University.
He's married to his wife, Amy. They're an awesome couple, Mike. They've been speaking at family life marriage conferences, I don't know how long, forever. And we've gotten a chance to know them, and they are just a quality couple. And what I love about Ed is he shoots straight. He tells you exactly what he's thinking, which is so valuable. So Ed, thank you for stepping in, not into the political world, but maybe to a world that needs even more help. And that is the insanity and incivility of youth sports. So Dr. Uszynski, coach, thank you for joining us coming back.
Ed Uszynski: Thank you. It's probably... Yeah, it might even be more hostile on a Saturday morning at a six-year-old's soccer game than it is in a political debate on TV. And Tim and Mike both, thanks for having me back. And I just want to say this, and if people listened to the last episode and they stuck around now to listen to this one, I don't think we said this. Both Brian and I, the co-author, Brian Smith, we love sports. And we're sports junkies. We grew up in intense sports backgrounds. We played at high levels, and I was a basketball player. He was a cross-country runner at Wake Forest. We're coaches now. We live and die with our sports teams in ways that are probably unhealthy on weekends. I mean, we have problems. We are part of the sport culture and have experienced it deeply in our soul.
And we don't plan on leaving it. I mean, we use Daniel actually as a parallel in the book that we want to follow in the footsteps of Daniel, who's living in an intensely secular Babylonian culture. And he doesn't separate from that culture and form a holy huddle where he's just going to huddle up with his friends and be completely apart from it, just throwing stones at it, nor does he, on the other hand, get completely swept up in it and look just like it so that you can't tell that he follows a different God.
He and his friends live right in the midst of that secular culture, and they seek to be obediently involved together, which I think is important. He's not doing it alone. He's locking arms with some other people that are saying, let's be counter cultural in this space. Youth sports is just another secular space. You have to do this in business. You have to do it in the educational realm. You have to do it in any job that you have, you're going to wind up, in a sense, playing an away game back in... Is that good product placement for the [inaudible 00:06:55]-
Tim Muehlhoff: That's is very good product placement. Yes.
Ed Uszynski: Yeah, you're playing an away game. You're being asked to be a counter-cultural hands and feet of Jesus person if you're a Christian, as you're listening to this, and so that's not going to be easy. You're playing on foreign turf and so you're going to have to be intentional to make some moves so that you don't wind up just getting swept up in it, and you don't wind up defaulting to, let's just separate from it entirely. We don't want to do that. We're all about sports.
Tim Muehlhoff: And I love that idea of Daniel. We were at a Little League Baseball game. We're watching our kids. By the way, this is the only time I've come close to getting kicked out of a game; thrown out by the umpire was at a Little League Baseball game. One of my kids was brought in, bases loaded. And again, what drives me crazy about Little League, this is a cathartic moment, is when an ump does not call strikes. He won't. He won't call a strike. And so my son is brought in, bases loaded, and sure enough, so I get up, this was the mistake, and I stand behind the umpire. The backstop is right there, a chain link fence. First pitch, hand to God, Ed, strike, right down the middle. He calls it a ball, calls it a ball.
I look in the stands, Noreen, my wife, looks at me like, "What?" And I just looked and said, "Okay, I don't know." Second one, I promise you, right down the middle calls a ball. Third one was a ball. Fourth one was a strike, so they walk, and now a run comes in, and now my son is just being... I mean, because every time now he walks, a person or a run comes in. Finally, I said to this ump, "What is your strike zone?" Right behind him. Ed, right behind him. And this ump turns around, looks at me, and he goes, "You want to stay?" And we just had this-
Ed Uszynski: That's a good counter question. That's a great counter question.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah. And I thought about my black belt training, and I had to take a walk. I had to take a walk all the way around the stadium, but that same game, get a load of this. This was before my finest hour. A man is walking through the stands, stops right in front of me and Noreen in front of everybody, and says, "Hey, I know you're a pastor. I'm not." I teach at a Christian university. He goes, "My wife just left me. Would you pray for me?" Same game. Same game. And I literally said in front of everybody in the stands who could hear every word, I said, "Of course, Noreen and I will pray for you." Then, 15 minutes later, I'm almost getting booted out of a game.
So let's focus on what's happening inside of me as the parent. Why in that moment... I mean, that is the maddest I have been in a long time, and I had 50 million responses to his question, "Do you want to stay?" And I thought this would be insanity. A Biola professor kicked out of a Little League game because of an umpire strike zone. So help me understand a little bit, Ed, what's happening inside of parents that this is really getting our goat. We're really getting angry.
Ed Uszynski: Amy and I have been married for 25 years, almost 26, actually. And I remember when people used to tell us before we got married that nothing changed them more, or showed them how selfish they were, or revealed what was really inside of them more than getting married. And then I remember after we'd been married and realized that was true, that the next round of people said, "There's nothing that's going to expose what's really going on inside of you more than having kids. Kids are going to wreck you." That was the positive message we used to get on that. And now I feel like, well, yeah, and I'd say the next level is kids that are playing youth sports have done more to expose dark areas of my soul that need to be sanctified.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah, that's good.
Ed Uszynski: As much as anything in the last 20 years of my life, it's been being in those spaces that these things have come out of me that sometimes I didn't even realize were in there-
Tim Muehlhoff: Mike and I are shaking our heads. We're literally shaking our heads like, yeah, it's crazy though, the emotions that surfaces.
Ed Uszynski: It's fascinating. And I think it's a great study even to ask, what was the source? What is the real source of the anger that you were feeling? Probably had something to do with injustice, but there might've been a whole bunch of other things going on too, and you just gave yourself permission, and we all do this. We give ourselves permission to just say whatever we want to say, to let our anger out in ways that wouldn't be appropriate at work, let's say. It would become an HR issue if we acted at work the way we act at our eight-year-old's volleyball game, we-
Tim Muehlhoff: Can you imagine me saying to my boss, "What is your criteria?"
Ed Uszynski: I mean-
Tim Muehlhoff: That would not fly.
Ed Uszynski: But we give ourselves permission to just let our demons fly, and we don't think about that they're actually demons. And Mike, I think you'll appreciate this as a spiritual formation guy. Dallas Willard, there's a name from the past. He used to talk about how we're being malformed by influences and culture. And what we really need to do is work against those forces that are actually malforming us. We need counterformation. We need to make intentional moves to be transformed in the midst of it. And guys, we're being malformed by sport culture. Again, we've already said that doesn't mean we need to run away from it, but we do need to recognize that we're being encouraged and validated in doing things that are actually not good for our soul. We're being shaped in a way by it. Most of us never think about it, but we're being shaped in a way that's actually not good for our soul or our following of Jesus, actually.
Mike Ahn: Yeah. Ed-
Ed Uszynski: Go ahead, Mike.
Mike Ahn: Ed, that is so good. I think if I remember correctly, Willard is saying is that everyone has a spiritual formation. We are all being shaped, no matter what. And I think my question for you is, how can we intentionally approach this as parents then, those of us who are parents in youth sports culture, how can we intentionally approach this as a counter formational type of opportunity?
Ed Uszynski: Yeah. Good. So, even going back to Tim's question, I need to ask what is going on inside of me and why? I really do. And Brian says the same thing. This is where we need to start. Why am I so angry? Why do I feel fear? Why am I so caught up in an imagined future that's impacting the way I feel right now, as I sit at this game? I've got this imagined future that I'm afraid is not going to be realized, and it's coming into this moment. What are the regrets that I have from my past that are somewhat unresolved from my own sports past that are coming up? My own interaction with coaches or umpires or places where I felt like I wasn't given a fair shake. Here's a good one. How much is my identity tied to what's happening here? I've got some identity issues.
It's kind of an embarrassing thing to have to say as a 57 year old man, but what's being exposed is that my identity is attached to my child's performance in a way that makes me feel way too proud when they do well and way too embarrassed when they struggle or make mistakes. And again, there's always going to be some measure of that in there, but it's like I realize inside myself that it's like I'm so ashamed I don't even want to come sit with the parents anymore because he dropped the ball.
And it's like, well, I mean, is that a healthy place to be as a grown man that I'm that attached... My sense of well-being is that attached to one of my kids' ability to catch a ball? So all of that is difficult to look at. It's uncomfortable. It's the kind of stuff that I'd rather just either stay in those dark places, or when it comes out, I don't want anybody to mess with it. Just let me be. Let me be rotten.
Tim Muehlhoff: And this is where it... So let's go back to my test case, okay? What made me angry was a multitude of things all coming together. One, your son is on the pitching mound. I mean, there's nothing like being a pitcher because everybody's literally looking at you and you're throwing this ball, and if he walks another person, another run scores. So I feel bad for him because I can see this all welling up in him. Again, this is literally, he's what? He's 12, he's 11. And I completely disagree with this umpire. I really do disagree with his perspective. Like, dude, how is that not a strike? Even legitimately, grab a bunch of umpires, have him stand with me, and let's judge whether we thought that was a strike or not.
And I think I'm going to win that argument. So now I feel like his perspective's whacked, my perspective is correct. And then second, there is this, you think you're better than me. This ump is like, you're on a power trip, and that really bugs me. That's my interpretation of him, uncharitable interpretation, and then when he turned around and challenged me, man, forget that First Peter, bless those who curse you. Man, I wanted to go to DEFCON 2 right there-
Ed Uszynski: So let's go to Mike's question. So all of us can resonate with all that, and that's good ability to identify and express what's happening inside yourself. So what do we do about that? I can just answer for myself, and again, I've heard Brian say these same kinds of things. Listen, I need to meet with God before I go sit in the stands at my kids' games. I need to meet with God in the same way somebody, again, in the context of marriage challenged me a long, long time ago and said, "Listen, I don't know what you've done with God all day long, but if she's in the house and you're coming up on the porch late in the day, you better meet with God on that porch before you walk inside the house because you're going to want to come in and be served and you're going to need to go in there and serve.
You're going to go in there and want to get love and get treated a certain way, but in fact, you need to go in there and be a certain kind of husband to your wife and a dad to your kids. And so I need spiritual intervention so that my flesh doesn't take over." It's the same thing at games. You know all that stuff is going to happen. At every single game you go to, there are going to be horrible calls. At every single game you go to, you're going to have an outsized appreciation for how your child should be getting treated, and he or she will not be getting treated that way by somebody. That is going to happen at almost every single game. At every single game, your kid is going to do something. If they're actually trying to get better, they're going to mess up actually.
They're going to fumble and mess up in different ways, and it's going to make you feel a certain kind of way. So again, Christian people, Christian listener, what does it look like to actually, before we go into those stands, before we go into the stadium, after we've done the drop off, to literally take some moments and talk to God and say, "Injustice is going to happen. Help me respond like a Christian to injustice when it happens to my kid or the other kids or our team." Help me to not see the parents on the other side as they, the way I've been... I'm getting constantly trained, we versus they, us versus them. Help me to transcend that and see them as human beings who are feeling the same things I'm feeling on the other side. And again, we're at this game that's help me remember this doesn't matter. The game doesn't, but how we respond to it does.
Tim Muehlhoff: Oh, man. Yeah.
Ed Uszynski: Help me to be available. Again, we're talking big boy, big girl stuff here. Okay?
Tim Muehlhoff: Yep.
Ed Uszynski: Help me to be so conscious of what's going on that I'm actually available to somebody if they need to talk to me about their failing marriage, like you talked about, Tim. Help me to be present to the other parents that are here and to be an ambassador of life and love. I mean, seriously, that sounds... You're in California. Look, I'm in Ohio. Sports is just as big of an idol here. I know what I just said sounds crazy, but that's what we are to be as Christians in that space. So I need to do that kind of work ahead of time so that I can step into those spaces and actually be a Christ follower and model something not only to the other people around me, but also to my kid because-
Tim Muehlhoff: So good.
Ed Uszynski: ... again, you know what I'm saying? Okay. Yeah, the ump was terrible today. He just was. She was awful. What are we going to do in life when things just go like that? What do you do? Dude, you keep picking the ball up, and you keep grinding, man. You try to find the strike zone, keep playing, but don't pout, don't show him up, because that's never going to work out well for you. You got to find a way to rise above those moments. Well, how the heck am I going to talk to my kid about that if I'm five seconds away from, do you want to stay? And the answer is, I'm about to get thrown out of here.
Mike Ahn: I mean, Ed, can I just say how simple that sounds, but how profound what you said is? I mean, it just sounds like, okay, hey, we got to meet with God. That sounds so simple, but it's so profound because we don't invite God into the game. We don't invite God into the youth sports culture. We invite God when we go to church or into marriage or different things like that, that we know are spaces that we need God in, but youth sports culture, we need God there so much. And I love that you brought that perspective.
Ed Uszynski: Okay. And if I'm honest, I don't want him there because I want to scream and yell and be angry and demanding-
Mike Ahn: That's right.
Ed Uszynski: ... and I want to yell at the other parents, but that's my flesh, and that's not going to be in the best interest of my kids or any of the other kids that all the adults are carrying on like that. It's just not.
Tim Muehlhoff: That's what I love about your chapter 10. I thought chapter 10 was the best before, during, and after the game. This really models what we try to do at the Winsome Conviction Project. We have this, what we call the Three Conversation Model. Conversation you have with yourself and God before the conversation, the middle conversation, and then the conversation you have with other people after the conversation. So I thought this was really good before, during, and after. You talk about creating Christianly mantras that researchers have proven that repeatedly chanting a mantra, whether quickly or calmly, alters brain activity, our brains begin to believe whatever we consistently preach to ourselves. So I love your book isn't just theoretical, filled with great research, but also, I love this idea of create Christianly mantras. Now, you mostly apply that to the child in chapter 10, but let's keep on our theme of applying this to ourselves.
How can this creation of a Christianly mantra, and you quote the passage Philippians 4, "Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever's true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things." And then you actually have some mantras that you created. Do you want me to read those off, or do they come to mind? And maybe what mantra do you use in those moments when the University of Michigan is unexpectedly beating Ohio State Buckeyes in front of everybody in your home stadium, which was really embarrassing, and your starting quarterback almost cried at the podium. So-
Ed Uszynski: Talk about being malformed. Talk about being malformed.
Tim Muehlhoff: Everything I said was true and okay, so what's the mantra that you use in the heat of the moment where you feel like... And by the way, I love what Mike just said. You can't pull from a reservoir that isn't there. So that reservoir had to already have been created. And then how do you create that reservoir, Ed? And then what's an example of a Christianly mantra?
Ed Uszynski: Well, and what's hard is you're usually creating that reservoir while you're riding on this speeding train. That's what's hard. Okay. So again, if you read this book and you start having these conversations before your kids are involved in youth sports, that would be ideal because then you really can come in wide-eyed and... But again, you may not believe everything we're talking about until you actually get in these spaces and you start to feel the things you're feeling, and you may not get it until you're actually there, but that would be the ideal time to do it. Let's just say this, Tim, even for the sake of listeners, there are a couple that come to mind, but when we're talking about mantras, we're not talking about some kind of a Buddhist recitation where we're holding our hands up to the sky and repeating something, but there is something to that in that we're being reminded of ourselves of truths that will help us transcend the moment. It's probably the corniest part of the book, honestly.
Tim Muehlhoff: Oh no. Yeah. No.
Ed Uszynski: But because, well, not all of them are going to work on every kid. And I can just hear people saying, "Well, that would never work, or "that sounds silly to me. I'd never say that." And that's why we've got a ton of them in there, but we invite listeners and readers, come up with your own. What reminder are you going to come up with for yourself and between you and your kid to help them and you transcend the moment? So one of the things that we talk about all the time with athletes is, hey, audience of one, man. Audience of one.
Ultimately, you're in the presence of God when you're playing, and he completely and totally accepts you just the way that you are. And he gave you these abilities to go out and enjoy a sport. Go play free and play like he's the only one that matters. Okay? That's what's behind that truth. Audience of one, man. Downtime is his time. That's something we used to talk about all the time. So you're in the middle of competition. Again, it's different to say this. A six-year-old might not be able to get this, but a 16-year-old will. We just had this conversation with a bunch of ninth graders in our house the other day.
When you're in the midst of competition, and there's all these kind of timeout moments, of course, when you're playing, you're focusing on actually playing the game. But when there's downtime, when you're standing on the sideline, when there's a timeout, maybe just become God-conscious again. Say, "God, thank you for being here with me. Remind me, something bigger is going on than this game." I mean, again, that's a big boy, big girl prayer to practice right in the middle of playing.
Tim Muehlhoff: I like that-
Ed Uszynski: Tim, what are the ones that you see there? What are some other ones that are in the book?
Tim Muehlhoff: Well, the one that resonated with me was with God for God. Because here's what I thought, Ed, that would be kind of funny. So you go to a Little League Baseball game, Pop Warner football game, right? But before you arrive, an announcement is made in front of everybody. And the announcement is now representing the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, Dr. Tim Muehlhoff, director of the Winsome Conviction Project. And now you take a seat, and you're like, "Hey, this isn't about the game anymore. This is about protecting Biola's reputation, protecting the Winsome Conviction Project, but I love yours is even more simple. This is God's reputation." And so now it's not about the game.
Ed Uszynski: It's so good. Yeah. Isn't it interesting? This is what I thought you were going to say, and that was great what you just said, but why is it... Brian just said this in a discussion yesterday. We go to games, and how many games start out with this reading: we just like to remind everyone here that the referees are doing the best they can, and we have to treat them with respect, and the opponents are... They're just kids playing a game, and may God bless us all. I mean, even in non-Christian schools, that's how we're starting games. And of course, that gets read and then all hell breaks loose, right? But it's like Christian people that are listening to that, that actually should be a trigger to say, "My goodness, we've already got the reading that's been given to us that we're ambassadors. We have a different identity. We represent a different kingdom."
And like Mike said, I need to bring that to bear on this moment. I don't get to have this be kept separate. It's actually one of the most critical spaces for me to live like a Christian because my kid's future is at stake. What he or she is watching from me is training them in something about the gospel. It's the Prodigal Son who comes home after really messing up, and he finds this loving father whose arms are open wide, saying, "Because of our relationship and who you are to me as a son, you come back to me, man, and I'm going to throw a party for you in spite of what a mess you are."
Instead of finding his older brother, whose arms are crossed and is saying, "You shouldn't get to come back here." How many of our kids are actually running into the older brother after games, during games, before games? Your validity here is based on how you're performing. Again, none of us as parents would ever want to say that. We'd say, "Oh no, that's not how I feel about my kid." But what we're actually communicating to them daily, you perform well, I'm happy and excited. You perform poorly, and I'm pouty after a game, and I'm discouraged, and I've got a list of corrections for you. You just want to connect with me, but man, I got correction.
I've been sitting here for two hours with a list forming of how you can be better at this, and all they want to do is go get ice cream and move on to the next thing. They don't really care about that. They just want to be reconnected to a safe person, and too often, I was anything but that for my first three kids, who were playing sports. I haven't even said that I've got three in college now and one who's in ninth grade. So I get one more chance with this ninth grader to try to... I got to keep rereading my own book to say, "Shut up and stop doing that to him and just be his dad and ask him and explore is he having fun. Ask him and explore is he seeing other people around him and learning to love those people instead of just asking about how well he performed at practice, which isn't going to matter."
Tim Muehlhoff: And these are your neighbors. These are your neighbors. I remember a Pop Warner practice they went on forever. It was ridiculous. Parents would show up, and practice was supposed to end at nine. It went another 45 minutes, and we're all afraid to talk to the coaches because you think your child will get penalized. So I've got two of my kids in the car, and some dude is not making a left. I mean, I'm like, "Dude, you got a green light. Make a left. It's almost 10:00 at night." I lay on my horn, and it is Kim, a friend of ours, and I did not see an elderly woman in the crosswalk. I did not see her. So I pull up to the light. Kim pulls right next to me. The window goes down, and he looks at me, and he's like, "Dude, what are you doing?"
I said, "I'm an idiot. I'm so sorry. I did not see the woman." And we just laughed. But listen, these are our neighbors that we're doing life in front of. And that's what I loved about chapter 10, is we've got to prepare just like we would if we were going to have a political conversation with a person. Just like we were going to have an evangelistic encounter with a next door neighbor, we prepare why I think youth sports is now this wonderful Petri dish of what's growing inside of me, and we can use spiritual formation to deal with it. So Ed, I wish we had more time.
Unfortunately, we don't, but what a great word today that one place we can let Christ's light shine is, of course, the political arena and things like that. But man, when we go to a sporting event, and we're just different, "Do not be conformed to this world," Paul says, you quote that in chapter 10. So what a great word for us. The book is called Away Game: A Christian Parent's Guide to Youth Sports. Your co-author, Brian's amazing, has a degree in theology and sports ministry, which I just think is a beautiful combination from Baylor. So where can they find the book?
Ed Uszynski: Well, I think it's being sold at any normal outlet, obviously, Amazon, and everything else around there. And our hope was really that people in the church would start having these conversations with each other. Just like we said at the beginning, that this wouldn't be an isolated thing where you just read the book and try to grind it out yourself, but get a small group maybe that wants to read it. And there's nothing magical in the book, but there are hopefully helpful tips on just how to do it differently, how to ask different questions, how to get a mind adjustment in the midst of everything that will help our kids follow Jesus.
Tim Muehlhoff: And what is Brian's website?
Ed Uszynski: Thechristianathlete.com. So he has populated that website for the last seven, eight years with great articles directly for athletes, and being a Christian athlete that I think would resonate at least with high school kids, maybe even junior high. And increasingly we've got more stuff there for coaches and for parents, and there's a few articles from me on there. That's just become sort of a clearing house of resources for us.
Tim Muehlhoff: That's good. Well, and listen, I'm going to apply what you have just taught us. So when Michigan and Ohio State play last game of the season, I'm going to pray that we both have good games, nobody gets hurt, and that I can weep with you after. All right, thank you to the Winsome Conviction Pod. I'm speaking, Ed, you can't interrupt.
Ed Uszynski: Sorry.
Tim Muehlhoff: Thank you for joining the Winsome Conviction Podcast. Go to our website, which is-
Ed Uszynski: That can't be the last word. That cannot be the last word of this podcast.
Tim Muehlhoff: Our website is wearehypocrites.com. No, it is winsomeconviction.com, and check out our archives. We had a great first conversation about this. How did world did we get in the mess we are with incivility in youth sports? And check out Ed's interview. We did a two-part interview on critical race theory, one of the most divisive topics that has really come up in the last 10 years. Ed, thank you so much for joining this podcast. You're one of our most trusted sources of input.
Ed Uszynski: Thank you, guys.
Tim Muehlhoff: So check out Winsome Conviction. Give us a like wherever you listen to your podcast, winsomeconviction.com. You can see all of our archives signed up for our quarterly newsletter. Thank you so much.
