Been thinking a lot about this question this morning, as all Tar Heels have after the prime-time shellacking our social-climbing football team and its famous head coach received last night.

I have been a Tar Heel for twenty-five years. We moved to Chapel Hill in 2000 for me to do the doctorate, and have stayed. All our children are born and raised here; the piedmont for the first ten years, and the mountains for the last fifteen.

We thought hard about coming here! Leaving Palo Alto and another Stanford degree seemed like foolishness from some POVs. But North Carolina beckoned. It was a “deep purple state” even then, before we used the term–with blue ascendant, especially in the Triangle. It was a better fit for our whole lives. We committed, and have (almost) never regretted the choice.

Believing is not just repping your team when they win! Anyone can do that. That’s why you can get a Carolina shirt at Hot Topic when men’s basketball is on a streak. And why casual fans howl for a head when the new guy delivers an 8-20 season.

No: believing is standing with your school when they lose.

And not just on the scoreboard. When the institution you attached yourself to on purpose loses its way–or better, when the whole enterprise breaks and your school trips on its laces trying to get onto the court. When the system you threw your lot in with twenty-five years ago betrays their values in almost every way they can be betrayed.

We all need something to believe in. As Wendell Berry taught me, our institutions ARE us.

And belief is irrational by definition: if it were rational, it wouldn’t be faith. Bruce Springsteen said that–he didn’t sing it the night we heard him in Kenan Stadium, but he got it. And he put it as the last song in the most no-reason-to-believe record he ever made, too.

Faith is stupid…and it is the only thing that matters. Finding it when you can’t find it is the only work worth doing.

Seeking a reason to believe today, in so many ways.

#GDTBATH