The Golden State Warriors and the faithful presence of God

Dear friends and family,

I was almost in tears as Game 6 of 2019 NBA Finals came to a close. Stephen Curry missed a potentially game-winning shot for the Golden State Warriors with a five seconds left in the game. A few Kawhi Leonard free throws later, and the Toronto Raptors were NBA champions.

It was not the result I was hoping for. A Warriors win would have forced a Game 7 in Toronto on Sunday. Curry’s missed shot still seems impossible. How does he miss that open of a look? How does that shot not go on in – as a final parting gift to the Oracle Arena faithful?

I stewed and processed as the post-game trophy presentations yammered away on the television. Lindsey asked me if we could turn it off and go to bed. I agreed. I replayed Curry’s shot a couple more times in my head then flicked off the screen.

This was not how the story was supposed to end. It was supposed to end with the Warriors overcoming a 3-1 series deficit – and Kevin Durant’s ruptured Achilles, and Klay Thompson’s torn ACL – to win their third consecutive NBA championship.

That was the way I drew it up in my mind, like a coach draws up a play on the whiteboard. That ending would be good, right, fitting, and comforting.

Call me a front-runner or bandwagon fan if you want. I don’t really care. Yes, I love the way the Warriors play basketball, and I love the joy that comes from watching them play basketball.

But I wanted the Warriors to win because they’ve been a constant presence in my life over the last several years. They’ve been in every NBA Finals since 2015, which is when our journey into fostering and parenthood began.

2015: Golden State defeats Cleveland, 4-2

I was at a pastors conference in St. Louis when I got a call from Lindsey saying that she was miscarrying. It was the first — and still only — time we have ever been pregnant.

I removed myself from the conference and tried to find, as the poet Ted Kooser says, “a plain [I] could flood with grief.” A poem came out of me – the first I had written in years. The levee broke.

But after a few hours in silence and tears – I don’t know how long – I knew I needed to think about something else. Distraction isn’t quite the right word. Comfort, perhaps. Reassurance. Maybe just the possibility of happiness. So I turned on the TV and watched all of Game 6, the finale to that Finals. The Warriors won their first championship by beating LeBron James’s Cleveland Cavaliers in Cleveland. In the midst of a kind of sorrow I had never known before, I was able to celebrate. To lose myself in someone else’s victory.

The grieving would resume. Father’s Day was that weekend.

2016: Cleveland defeats Golden State, 4-3

Even now, I can’t fully comprehend how much changed in our lives between June of 2015 and June of 2016. On the same day that the Cavaliers capped off one of the greatest comebacks in sports history – coming all the way back from a 3-1 hole to win Game 7 in Oakland – I was celebrating my first Father’s Day with my three foster kids. James had been placed with us just a few months prior, and we had just said yes to a sibling set of two sisters who were placed with us just a few days prior – on the one year anniversary of our miscarriage.

The Warriors lost when all was good but extremely crazy, unpredictable, and uncertain in our lives. We were a couple months away from starting the court hearings that would determine James’s future. And while we loved being a family of five, the girls only lived with us for about four months.

2017: Golden State defeats Cleveland, 4-1

We had just come out of an intense and exhausting season: the termination of James’s biological parents’ rights to be his parents. The legal stuff was still not fully done, but he was – at last – as good as ours. We tried to make 2017 a year of “normalcy,” a year of slowing down and enjoying ourselves. I remember some fragments of that June. We went on hikes in the prairie. We were still involved in the lives of the two girls we had fostered; they would come over on Sundays, and so would a few neighborhood kids, and our backyard was full. I remember finally being able to breathe. I remember watching this and feeling that all was right with the world.

2018: Golden State defeats Cleveland, 4-0

On June 8, the Warriors swept the Cavs for their second-consecutive NBA championship, and our family was in the middle of planning for James’s adoption. On June 23, we formally adopted James Lee Sides and threw a huge party. All was right with the world.

2019: Toronto defeats Golden State, 4-2

Another June has come around, and we’re a family of five again and on the verge of adopting our two girls. It’s almost Father’s Day. God is good, even if the Warriors don’t win.

What it all means

Five years. Five different kids. Five Finals appearances by the Warriors. This might seem like an odd way to remember and categorize life's monumental seasons. And while it is true that the Warriors being in the NBA Finals for five straight years is not the only (or weightiest) source of constancy over this timeline, their presence has still been a kind of grace in my life.

God does not leave us comfortless. He does not spit us out into this world without means to make sense of it, to see him, to track our time, to organize our days, to recognize landmarks, to set up monuments made of physical stuff. Seasons matter. Cultural artifacts – like NBA Finals – matter. These are all gifts from him to help us walk the roads we’ve been given, to help ground us in this world of thunderstorms and blizzards and scraped knees and broken hearts.

“Correctly then is this world called the mirror of divinity; not that there is sufficient clearness for man to gain a full knowledge of God, by looking at the world, but . . . the faithful, to whom he has given eyes, see sparks of his glory, as it were, glittering in every created thing. The world was no doubt made, that it might be the theater of divine glory.” – John Calvin

It’s all a theater, and it's all pointing to him. The good and the bad. The wins and the losses. The certainties and the uncertainties. It’s all there to help us. Only if we have eyes to see and hands to receive it. Even something like basketball qualifies as help. It’s not a distraction; it’s not fluff. As the poet Christian Wiman puts it, “Thus the very practical effects of music, myth, and image, which tease us not out of reality, but deeper and more completely into it.”

So I can choose to look for parallels between my life and the result of this year’s Finals, or I can choose not to. I can pray for the grace to live “deeper and more completely” into my life through art, music, literature…and NBA basketball. Because the Warriors' presence has become a part of my story, as God would have it, I am choosing to look for the deeper meaning. And I do see parallels. Twitter and all the sports-media talking heads are wondering if this is the end of the Warriors’ dynasty. Durant and Thompson’s injuries complicate things. The future of the franchise is clear as mud. People are asking, "Is this the end?” In our lives right now, Lindsey and I are asking if our “run” of children is over. Will we remain a family of five, or does God have more kids in our future? Are biological kids in our future? Are we still feeling called to foster care? Where is God leading us? How do we make decisions in faith? Can we be okay with being in process, loving each other and creating a safe place to share our thoughts and emotions with freedom and grace?

I am preaching to myself here. I need reminders that the world is glittering – “charged” by God’s grandeur, as Gerard Manley Hopkins saw it — because I am not good at being in process. I am not good at being patient. I am not good at warding off “faithless fears and worldly anxieties,” as an old prayer says. So I need things like the Warriors dynastic run to help me see how God is moving, working, preserving.

And as I alluded to earlier, the Warriors’ presence in the NBA Finals is just one of many sources of this deep preservation of hope, this existential echolocation. There are other resources that God has given us. But as strange as  it sounds, Curry’s missed shot and the what-ifs of this year's Finals – it’s another landmark, another deposit, another mile marker on this particular stretch of highway.

This might be taking thing things a bit too far, but the Warriors being such a constant during the most wonderful/intense/beautiful/crazy stretch of my life is kind of like a sacrament. It’s an outward sign of an inward reality: God is there, always faithful, and we are his people and the sheep of his pasture (Psalm 100) – regardless of circumstances, regardless of my ability to fend for myself or understand the future.