Friday Night Lights is one of the best football movies ever made. It is a story about a high school football team in west Texas, the pressures and expectations to win the state championship, and the highs and lows they experience throughout the season. At the center of the team is all-star running back, Boobie Miles.

Boobie is the definition of the total package. He’s fast, strong, and agile, and can block, catch and throw. At the beginning of the film we see every major Division I football program wants him. He is cocky, but has the skills to back it up. When asked about his grades he says that he is a straight A student, because the only subject is football. The team and the whole town put their hopes on Boobie to win the state championship. The stars seem to align. Then the unthinkable happens . . .

Boobie injures his knee in the first game of the season.

Boobie then watches from the sidelines, first as his team struggles and then thrive under the excellent gameplay of Sophomore running back, Chris Comer. Throughout this time Boobie downplays his injury, insisting that he will be back in action in a couple weeks, that him sitting out is precautionary. Which brings us to the clip below. Boobie gets his knee checked out be a specialist. However, the hospital is located in his rival town the week they play each other.

When the doctor tells Boobie that he can’t play because of the damage done to his knee, he becomes indignant. He doesn’t trust that the doctor is being honest with him, rather he believes that the doctor is trying to keep him from playing so that Midland will win the football game. He accuses the doctor of trying to take is football career.

What happens next is predictable. Boobie told the coach that the doctor cleared him, gets put in the game, and injures his knee worse than before. This next clip shows Boobie when it is official that he will never play high school football again.

Boobie starts the scene with the same swagger he always had with his teammates. He cleans out his locker as his teammates look on with sadness, disbelief, and pity. A look that communicates “You were the best of us. This shouldn’t have happened to you. I don’t know if we can do this without you.” Boobie gives them one last encouragement and swaggers out of the locker room.

Once Boobie is in the safe presence of his uncle his true heart come out. He sobs heart-wrenching sobs, “What am I gonna do now? I can’t do nothin’ else but play football.” All the work he put in, wasted. All his dreams of making it to the pros and buying his uncle a house, shattered.

Anger and Grief are Windows to our Heart

Nobody ever told Boobie that he was more than a football player. His entire identity revolved around his performance on the field. Football was his purpose, his passion, and his hope for a future. In short, football was his god. He never considered that his god would let him down, so he never developed other interests or became a well-rounded human being. Boobie’s emotional reactions show us how much being a football player meant to him.

God gave us emotions for a reason. Our emotions reveal what is important to us. They reveal what we love. Anger is the feeling connected to what we perceive to be unjust, a wrong done, or something not being as it should. It can also be a response to fear. Boobie was angry at the doctor because he believed the doctor was unfairly keeping him from doing what he loved. Grief is what we feel when we lose something or someone important. For Boobie, he lost his football career and the potential to use football to have a better financial future. It is not sinful to feel these things. There are many examples in the Gospels where Jesus wept or expressed anger and he lived a sinless life.

As fallen people, our issue is not that we feel strongly, but that we feel strongly about the wrong things. Saint Augustine taught that the essence of sin was having disordered loves. We are meant to love God first then love others. Our love and desire for other things should come after these. Here is an example from my life.

There are times when my 3-month old son won’t stop crying and, depending on my patience level, I will either feel sad or angry. When I feel sad, I am responding with empathy. I hurt that he is hurting. When my response is anger, I feel like he is wronging me by not letting me have some peace and quiet. In the moment, my desire for peace and comfort is greater than my desire to love and empathize with my son. My loves get out of order. (This isn’t me beating myself up. I know God has grace especially for sleep-deprived parents.)

Boobie was not wrong to love football and I am not wrong for enjoying comfort. Both are gifts from God that he gives for us to enjoy. The problem comes when we allow the gifts to become the most important thing in our life. I thank God that Jesus died for my disordered loves and the harm they cause me and others. It is a lifelong struggle to reorder our loves to put God in first place. But he gives grace for when we fall short, and power and wisdom through his Spirit to love what we ought as we ought.

I encourage you is to pay attention when you have a strong emotional reaction. What did you feel? What happened that made you feel that way? What did you desire in that moment? Is that desire properly ordered? How might God be trying to get your attention in the midst of this?

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“Now physical beauty, to be sure, is a good created by God, but it is a temporal good, very low in the scale of goods; and if it is loved in preference to God, the eternal, internal, and sempiternal Good, that love is as wrong as the miser’s love for gold, with the abandonment of justice, though the fault is in the man, not in the gold. This is true of everything created; though it is good, it can be loved in the right way or in the wrong way – in the right way, that is, when the proper order is kept, in the wrong way when that order is upset.”

City of God, XV.22