The One Who Needs Me the Most

This year two brothers will face each other as coaches of rival teams in the championship game of their sport for the first time in American sporting history.


Jim Harbaugh will coach the San Francisco 49ers and John Harbaugh will coach the Baltimore Ravens in Super Bowl 47.

They played each other in 2011. The Ravens won. After the game their parents went beneath the stadium to the locker rooms.

Their mother, who had sat stoically through the entire game, not wanting to show anything that could be interpreted as favoritism, said that as she and her husband walked past the Ravens locker room she thought, “We really aren’t needed here…” (LA Times, January 24, 2013). But when they arrived at the 49ers locker room and found their son, by himself with his hands on his head, in coach-mode, they knew that was where they needed to be.

It has been argued that all living things are hard-wired to favor the strongest offspring as they are the ones most likely to pass on their DNA. That may well be true, but human being can be and are more than their wiring.

It can also be argued that in the Christian life, we are more like the mother who, when she was asked if she had a favorite among her children answered, “Yes. The one who needs me the most.”

Jesus came to those who needed him, to those who knew their need for a savior. “’Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners’.” Matthew 2:17b