Our son was born to play soccer, or so I thought. As a tyke, he was unstoppable. Goal after goal he made, roaring up and down the field like the little engine that could. By the time he was ten years old, competitive soccer was our life. Family dinners consisted of Taco Bell or Subway on a blanket beside the goal posts. Weekends were for tournaments. Weekdays consisted of two hour practices Monday through Friday, the practice field a half hour drive from our home. The wheels on our SUV went round and round all over northern California. And our wallet felt the strain.

And then one day it hit us. Did we really want to live this way? Worshiping soccer.

The realization that soccer ruled our life didn’t happen overnight. It took several years to accept this truth. And plenty of prayer to do something about it.

I remember the day a man’s words pierced my heart. He was a missionary from Madagascar talking with our son at family camp one summer. This missionary noticed our son’s foot attached to a soccer ball morning, noon, and night. The missionary told our boy, “I see you love soccer, Son. Don’t ever let soccer become bigger than your God.”

Too late for that, I thought to myself. My son’s idol was soccer. My idol was our son’s happiness.

After that, I began praying for God to take soccer out of our son’s heart. And praying for me to be more concerned with pleasing God than pleasing my child. This was hard because I wanted our son to be happy and soccer made him happy.

Happy. Happy. Happy.

But how could we keep letting our son miss church on Sundays because he traveled with his team for games? In the early years of soccer, we had loaded up our family and gone with our son on weekends. Sometimes we stayed in motels when the games were far away and we found other churches to visit, but as we kept having more children, and kept missing our church at home, we realized we could no longer live this way. So we trusted our son to his coaches and allowed him to travel alone with his team.

I’ll never forget how crushed I was one Sunday night when I found out some older boys on our son’s team had shown our son explicit stuff on a smart phone that Sunday morning. About this same hour my husband and I sat in church. Not only was our son missing church, he was learning the ways of the world while traveling with his team.

Around this time, I read Isaiah 58:13, “Keep the Sabbath day holy. Don’t pursue your own interests on that day, but enjoy the Sabbath and speak of it with delight as the LORD’s holy day. Honor the Sabbath in everything you do on that day, and don’t follow your own desires or talk idly.”

Ouch. Following our own desires. Pursuing soccer on Sundays.

I realize not all families see Sundays as their Sabbath. And a life of legalism and binding oneself to a Sabbath is as consuming as any sport out there. The real question is this: what have we set our hearts on? Where do we pour our money? Our time? Our tender mercies?

A trip to the altar for prayer with a pastor helped my husband and I see we needed to pull our son and our hearts out of soccer. Thankfully, God had been working on our son too, and he took it pretty well. We all missed his exciting games in the days that followed. Missed the weekends in the river bottoms where home games played out. Especially missed autumn tournaments with golden leaves blanketing the fields and migrating geese overhead. Giving up competitive soccer was painful. But recommitting our Sundays to God felt so good.

In the years since, we’ve circled our wagons at home. Slowing down and being a family that eats at our dinner table. Several of our boys, including our once competitive soccer player now 16, enjoy soccer at school. High school soccer is demanding, and nearly every afternoon of the week right now we’re at a soccer game with three of our boys on three different school teams, but come dinner time, and Saturdays and Sundays, we are home as a family. And all of us are sitting in church together on Sunday.

The Bible says there’s a time for every season under heaven. When autumn ends, soccer ceases for us, too. I’m so grateful soccer is a season for our family again. Instead of a way of life.