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By the time late July rolls around, sports fans like me are ready to breathe a sigh of relief.

It's been 172 days since the Pittsburgh Steelers, with a little help from the refs, won Super Bowl XL. Since then, we've had baseball. But unless you root for one of the roughly five teams that has a real shot at winning the World Series each year, it's hard to get excited about the interminable, 162-game season. (Note to Bud Selig: When the payroll disparity between your highest and lowest spending teams is $185 million, something is broken.) Don't get me wrong: Baseball is a great sport, just not a great league.

So when late July rolls around, I feel a surge of new life. Finally, football training camps are opening around the country. The new season will kick off soon. More importantly, so will the chase for the company Fantasy Football League trophy.

Fantasy football is the Holy Grail of fantasy sports and, for many office denizens like myself, the highlight of every work year. (I can admit that openly because my boss is in the same league, pursuing the same Christianity Today International FFL trophy.)

Fantasy football got its start, according to Fantasy Football Index, in 1962, when a part owner of the Oakland Raiders, Wilfred Winkenbach, created the game with two Oakland Tribune reporters during a road-game trip to New York. They developed a system for choosing skill players around the league, scoring their achievements each game, and allowing fantasy teams to compete head-to-head. They called their league the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League (GOPPPL).

The premier player in GOPPPL's first season was George Blanda, who threw 27 TD passes, kicked 11 field goals (out of 26 attempts) and completed 48 extra-point kicks (out of 49). Peyton Manning, step aside.

Fantasy football has grown a bit since that inaugural season. Thanks largely to the internet, about 15 to 18 million players—or "owners," as we prefer to be called—now run teams in thousands of leagues, and the game continues to attract new players at a rate of 7 percent to 10 percent each year. As an industry, fantasy sports rake in at least $1.5 billion in revenue annually.

The attraction, no doubt, has a lot to do with the thrill and illusion of major-league control. In real life, no professional sports team has ever called to ask my opinion about a possible trade or coach hiring. But in my fantasy league, I get to make the decisions professionals would never trust me to make.

I was the one who picked Freddie Mitchell as a rookie in 2001, for instance, before he began a string of four forgettable seasons marked by more sound bites than touchdowns. I also picked Tampa Bay's defense the next year, when they carried the Buccaneers to a Super Bowl victory and regularly piled up more fantasy points than most wide receivers.

I've won some, and I've lost some. But it's been all me. My decisions. My will. My domain.

Normally, I never get that level of control. More than likely, you don't either. Cats pee on the carpet, spouses disagree with us, children need medical care, jobs bring stress into our lives—and that was just last week for me. As James wrote to the church in Jerusalem: "Now listen, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.' … You ought to say, 'If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that'" (James 4: 13–15).

As Christians, God is the GM of our lives, not us. That can be hard to take at times. Furthermore, in God's economy, control and responsibility are inextricably tied. We don't have a say over much that we encounter, yet God holds us responsible for our attitudes, actions, and responses. In fact, God asks that we hand over our free will—what Jesus called "taking up our Cross" and following him—in exchange for even greater responsibility, a call to live "as children of light," "making the most of every opportunity," and "understand[ing] what the Lord's will is" (Eph. 5).

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July (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50