It was a High School football game. He sat a few seats from me on the same row. After awhile he asked me, \u201cWho are these teams?\u201d I told him, then asked, \u201cWhere are you from.\u201d His reply of \u201d Port Arthur\u201d told me all I needed to know. Adjacent to the football stadium is the basketball arena where Hurricane Harvey evacuees were being housed. He had lost everything – house, car, clothes, job; and caught a bus out of the devastation, ending up in Fort Worth, on the row with me at a High School football game. Unable to return home for two months, he was simply passing time by watching a game between teams he had never heard of before, refusing to give up, looking forward to going home and resuming his life. It reminded me of a Tom Landry quote \u2013 \u201cA champion is simply someone who did not give up when they wanted to.\u201d It also reminded me of a lesson re-learned from the Apostle Paul, who wrote, \u201ctribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope.\u201d (Romans 5:3-4). For the first time in my life, I left a football game weeping.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was a High School football game. He sat a few seats from me on the same row. After awhile he asked me, \u201cWho are these teams?\u201d I told him, then asked, \u201cWhere are you from.\u201d His reply of \u201d Port Arthur\u201d told me all I needed to know. Adjacent to the football stadium is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-morning-manna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1787\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}