Sports fans have long memories and, to be honest, an occasionally overdeveloped sense of justice and injustice. It’s one of the reasons that non-sports fans find us so insufferable.
Ancient games are analysed and reanalysed, the question of who deserved what, or didn’t deserve anything, endlessly picked apart: Leeds United deserved to win the 1975 European Cup; Ben Stokes deserved to prevail in the Headingley Test. And, from my point of view, Bognor Regis Town deserved to get thrashed 6-1 by Dulwich Hamlet last Saturday. After all, they beat us in the playoff final two years ago.
But then, as I walked home from the game I felt an uneasy chill creep down my spine. Did they really deserve it? What if we all got what we deserved? What if I did?
It was an uncomfortable idea and it followed me into Sunday morning, when I was short and snappish with my Mum for not knowing how to work my laptop. If I am unloving even to my Mum, I worried, how can I ever deserve to be loved?
Yet Christians believe that being loved, and in particular being loved by God, has absolutely nothing at all to do with what we deserve. It’s not a reward for being good and it’s not an incentive to be good when we’re bad.
God loves us solely and exclusively because she chooses to. And God chooses to love everyone, unconditionally, whether we are old or young, gay or straight, cis or trans, black or white, in jail or in government. Butcher, baker, candlestick maker. God loves everybody. And God loves us whether we deserve it or not.
We call it grace and it is, without exaggeration, literally the best thing ever because I reckon that sometimes it is an almost impossibly hard thing to imagine that we can be loved. So the most important thing to know at the start of every day is that we can be. And I believe we are. All of us.
We are loved and it is a gift. And when I own that gift of grace I can give it away in turn: to my friends and family, sure, but also to the people who annoy me, the ones I disagree with, the ones I thought only God could love. Even, on any given Saturday, to Bognor Regis Town.
The picture, by Ollie Jarman, is of the peerless Nyren Clunis during that FA cup game vs Bognor.