In the week before Armando Galarraga’s stolen glory early last month, I was finishing my spring reading of one the most important books a Christ-following athlete and sports fan can read, Shirl James Hoffman’s Good Game.

Hoffman asks all kinds of excellent questions and challenges the way the church in America has increasingly put its stamp of approval on every venture of sports without thinking critically about how, say, ultimate fighting carves into a spectator’s soul, not to mention what it does to the God-designed brain of the participants.

One of those key questions is this: Do sports really provide opportunities for learning that other endeavors do not?

For instance, we often say that the practice of sports trains an athlete in dedication and perseverance. Such a statement is intended to “automatically” condone the purpose of sports over and above other ventures. But what is a pianist learning through hours of committed practice? Might it be dedication and perseverance? And might it come without the risk of injuries that can alter a person’s quality of life for years to come?

Stretching the idea further, what about the student who makes an annual practice of spending his or her summer in missions activities (can anyone say Tim Tebow)? Isn’t there plenty of dedication and perseverance to be learned there—along with selfless giving? The motivation in digging trenches for concrete and rebar foundations or playing with Third World children just isn’t the same as the motivation in pushing blocking sleds for hours on end. No one gives out trophies or names All-America teams for the former.

All of which led me to a question of my own: What do sports provide for us that other activities cannot? And oddly, in those days before Jason Donald was called safe at first when he was clearly out and Galarraga lost his perfect game on what should have been the game’s last play, I came to this: Sports teach us Americans, who are so unaccustomed to it, about injustice.

No sooner had I thought this might be true than the cavalcade began. Galarraga lost his perfect game. The US was deprived of not one, but two “obvious” goals in World Cup competition. Though it may not have affected the outcome of the game, in the final minute of a Celtic win during the NBA Finals, the referees went to review an out-of-bounds touch and still could not see what was as plain as those arena lights on my TV. And closer to home, an after-the-fact inquiry with the folks who know their golf rules at the USGA showed that a misruling wrongly flipped the outcome of a significant high school competition—but by then the cards were all signed and the trophies handed out; there was no turning back.

All the time in sports, injustice happens. Things that should go one way go the other, not by player error, but by outside interference or—perhaps—divine intervention.

When I get to griping about “the system,” in sports or in life, my wife will say with perfect theology, “God has a purpose for this.” And while I know that she is right, my skull also echoes with the laments of Job and the psalmists, who frequently laid out their miseries about the way of the world, which is so often unjust.

Maybe God’s “purpose for this” is to teach me that the world is full of injustice. Children are kidnapped and enslaved so we might buy cheap clothes or cheap sex. Teens are lured by drugs and alcohol, setting them up for addictions “beyond their control” (the hallmark of injustice). Women are falsely wooed then battered and abandoned, made destitute by broken promises that came their way because they dared nothing more than to trust another. And men are cheated by preying con artists, sometimes posing as clean-as-a-whistle white collar investment agents, who borrow from one but do not pay back to another.

Maybe God’s “purpose for this” is to teach me to cry out to Him, because solace is coming from nowhere else. System failure is all around me. But the faithfulness of the Savior will stand on the earth. Somehow I need to learn all this. Maybe sports are my best teacher in this matter.