[I write a column for a local chain of suburban Cincinnati newspapers. Here's the column version of my "rant" about radio host Colin Cowherd's assessment of Peace Corps volunteers.]
Most radio talk show hosts follow a simple formula: Say something outrageous, inciting incensed people to call in, causing others to listen, and do it all so that the station can sell advertising. I get it.
Because of my unwillingness to be "played" by these folks, I rarely listen to conventional talk radio of any kind. These days, that includes sports radio, to which I once listened with fair regularity.
But recently, I tuned into the show of ESPN Radio personality, Colin Cowherd. Cowherd is smart, quick, often funny. Not this day, though.
Cowherd was addressing the return of Theo Epstein as general manager of the Boston Red Sox. This baseball wunderkind who reconstructed the long-suffering BoSox franchise, turning it into a World Series winner in 2004, left the team a few months ago. But the Red Sox have lured him back.
Apparently, at the time of his departure from Boston, there was talk that Epstein might join the Peace Corps. The remembrance of this uncorked a scurrilous rant from Cowherd who proclaimed that Epstein was too smart and too much of a winner to join the Peace Corps.
The Peace Corps, Cowherd said, was a place for thirty-nine year olds who just got axed from their jobs. It's an organization, he expanded, for people "we don't need here." Life, he said, is about "a good steak and a good laugh," not being a do-gooder digging ditches in Borneo.
Theo Epstein, Cowherd said, can take any co-ed in Boston home with him any night of the week. He can go to any bar in the area and get his drinks for free. The notion that Epstein would give up the good life to do something as useless as volunteer in the Peace Corps was, Cowherd exclaimed, "AB---SURD."
Apparently, Cowherd has never met anybody who's been in the Peace Corps.
I think of Karen, late member of the congregation I serve as pastor. Right after college, she joined the Corps and went to Sub-Saharan Africa. Why did she do it? Karen was a deeply committed follower of Jesus Christ and believed in service as a way of gratefully responding to God's love, forgiveness, and life.
Even after she came home, settled into her career as a manager with an environmental engineering firm, married, and had a family, she saw service as an important element in her life. She was active in our congregation and also volunteered with a local agency as a tutor, teaching adults how to read.
On her thirty-fifth birthday, Karen learned that she had cancer. The prognosis wasn't good. Yet, as her health deteriorated, she continued to play guitar in our church musical ensemble, helped us serve dinners to the poor in Cincinnati's inner-city, and when an opening appeared on our Church Council, volunteered to serve as vice president. When she volunteered, I asked her, "Karen, are you sure that you want to do that?" "Mark," she told me, "I've decided that I want to give whatever time I have left to Jesus Christ."
Cowherd’s words may have been mere bombast. But he sure got it wrong! I love baseball and I respect Theo Epstein for what he's accomplished in Boston. But I can't say that his achievements are of greater value than those of a faithful, world-wise, funny, intelligent servant of Jesus Christ named Karen. She was in the Peace Corps and she wasn't a loser.
Jesus once said that the first will be last and the last will be first. Maybe from the short-term perspective of free drinks and one-night stands, some people are deemed to be first. But in the longer view of eternity, the real winners are people like Karen. Gratefiul for God's service to us in Christ, they serve others. Because they do, they enrich and ennoble the whole human race one person at a time.
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