Posted September 03, 2026
My wife and I were invited to attend the Masters the year Tiger Woods won the tournament for the first time. My older son and I were at the Dallas Cowboys game when Tony Romo became their starting quarterback. I say that to say that I know them better than some, but they do not know me at all.
Why should they? Tiger Woods made more than $120 million playing golf; Tony Romo made more than $127 million playing football. Both have made even more through celebrity appearances and television roles. I cannot see why they would need or want a relationship with me.
And yet, both are in the news today not because of their enormous wealth but their human frailty.
Woods was in a rollover crash in Florida last March. He had hydrocodone pills in his pocket at the time, medication he used to treat his chronic pain. He pleaded guilty to a reckless driving charge in court yesterday; his license was suspended for five years as a result.
The day before, Romo pleaded no contest to operating a vehicle while intoxicated, a charge resulting from his July arrest in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He later released a statement admitting an “over-reliance on alcohol” to treat chronic back issues. His license will be revoked for six months, and he must complete an Alcohol Assessment Program and install an ignition interlock device on any vehicle he owns.
Watching their stories unfold, it occurs to me that I’m glad to live in a country where even multimillionaire celebrities are not above the law. By my calculation, police officers in Florida and Wisconsin make less than 2 percent of the annual incomes of Woods and Romo when they played. The county judge who sentenced Woods yesterday earns less than 4 percent of Woods’ annual income on the PGA Tour.
In most nations across most of history, such impartiality in the justice system would be unthinkable. You and I live in a place and time where more people have more opportunity to be their best selves than ever before.
I’m thinking about this fact today for a reason that transcends our moment and even our country.
I would be a terrible squirrel.
The furry animals are quite common where we live. I often see them scaling tall trees and jumping Tarzan-style from branch to branch. I watched yesterday as one trotted across the top ridge on our roof before springing into the nearby tree.
They clearly do not share my distaste for heights. When I get on an airplane, I try to get an aisle seat, read a book, and pretend I’m on the ground until I am. If I were a squirrel, I would stay on terra firma as much as possible. But that’s where coyotes, foxes, hawks, and eagles would be far more likely to make me their next meal. Squirrels are wise to stay as high off the ground as possible, which would make me a very unwise member of their species.
I am nearly as unwise when I am not the best version of myself within the species that I am. When I live on an earthly level where spiritual predators can attack, I disobey the command to “set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on the earth” (Colossians 3:2).
In large part, this is because I need to remember what squirrels never seem to forget: this moment is the only moment there is. My furry neighbors prepare for winter, but so far as I know, they don’t worry about it. They seem to be fully in the present, constantly aware of possible predators and living from tree branch to tree branch. The moment they get distracted by “tomorrow” is the moment they fall from the tree today.
By contrast, I am constantly thinking about tomorrow, about next week and next month, about the problems I will face and the things I will need to do. This is not entirely my fault. C. S. Lewis had his chief tempter, Screwtape, write to his demonic apprentice:
The humans live in time but our Enemy [God] destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. . . . He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with him) or with the Present—either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.
I spent a year in doctoral work studying the thought of the German theologian Paul Tillich. He was sometimes accused of being an atheist because he claimed that God does not exist. The accusation makes sense until you understand his meaning: to “exist” is to be in existence, to be a creature among creatures, to be one among many. To Tillich, God is the “Ground of Being,” the “Ultimate Concern,” the essence above existence.
But such a metaphysical approach to our Father was perhaps too metaphysical even for him. Frederich Buechner writes that when Tillich went to the beach, “he would pile up a mound of sand and sit on it gazing out at the ocean with tears running down his cheeks.”
Buechner speculates that “it was when he looked at the ocean that he caught a glimpse of the One he was praying to. Maybe what made him weep was how vast and overwhelming it was and yet at the same time as near as the breath of it in his nostrils, as salty as his own tears.”
As a wise friend told me many years ago, all of God there is, is in this moment.
“The man who has God for his treasure has all things in One.” —A. W. Tozer
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