Sports, Athletics & Faith (Part 3) w/ Fr. Burke Masters and Trevor Williams

Restore The Glory Podcast

Jake Khym

Religion & Spirituality, Christianity

4.9 • 971 Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2025

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week, Jake and Bob conclude their series on athletics by welcoming Fr. Burke Masters, the baseball priest, and Trevor Williams, the Washington Nationals pitcher, to the show! Together they discuss finding your identity in Christ when your job is about performing well, evangelizing as a professional athlete, and how sports can aid you in becoming a better Christian. Fr. Burke and Trevor also share how God led them to athletics, the story of how they met, and play a fun game with Jake and Bob at the end of the episode.

Key Points:

Even when our jobs demand we perform well, our core identity is as beloved children of God, not in what we do or achieve.
True humility is revealed in how we respond both to success and to failure, not just in our losses.
Integrating faith and sports means living out Christian values and witness in every context, not separating religious life from professional or competitive arenas.
Authentic evangelization often emerges through genuine relationships, presence, and consistency of character, more than through words alone.
Practice, discipline, and perseverance in sports mirror the virtues needed in the spiritual life.
The tension between ambition and surrender is navigated by directing all striving and success toward God's glory rather than personal gain.
Regular self-examination and reflection help transform both athletic and spiritual setbacks into opportunities for growth.
Balancing vocations—such as career and family—requires intentional boundaries and prioritization of what truly matters.

Resources:

Chapters:

00:00:00 Introduction

00:03:33 Trevor's Family and Journey to Baseball

00:12:06 Fr. Burke's Baseball Story and Journey to the Priesthood

00:20:18 Finding Identity in God Not Sports

00:26:38 How Fr. Burke and Trevor Met

00:33:52 Evangelization in Professional Sports

00:39:24 Balancing Baseball and Family Life

00:41:55 How Sports Help You Become a Better Christian

00:50:39 Not Relying Solely on Your Own Effort

00:56:25 Sports Teaching Us How to Lose

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, listeners, we wanted to let you know about a special event that we have coming up that myself and
0:05.1	Bob and a colleague of ours, Christopher Lafitte, will be doing. It's a healing workshop for professionals.
0:11.6	Bob, what's the theme this year? Yeah, this is for therapists, for anybody in the healing professions,
0:16.6	and even people that are in ministry, priest, religious, anybody in pastoral ministry,
0:22.3	I think it will apply to everybody, probably most of the listeners to the podcast.
0:27.0	And it's sexual healing, healing our sexual wounds.
0:30.4	So we're going to go deep into looking at not just the surface of our sexual wounds,
0:36.2	but kind of what's underneath them and how do we bring healing restoration there?
0:41.3	Yeah, we're really excited to be able to offer it to these wonderful people.
0:45.3	So October 23rd and 24th are the dates.
0:49.3	It will be a virtual event, so you'll go and access it through an online course platform.
0:54.8	To find out more information, you can go to the John Paul II-Sekin website.
0:58.8	So that's jpII Healing Center.org.
1:03.0	And when you go to that main homepage, there will be some banners that are going across that are explaining about various events.
1:09.7	And then click the one that says
1:10.9	Healing Professionals Virtual Workshop. We'll also have that link in the show notes for you to check out.
1:16.9	And we hope to see you there. God bless. Welcome to Restore the Glory podcast. My name is Jake Kim.
1:23.3	And I'm Bob Schutz. We're two former Catholic therapists exploring the journey of healing through the integration
1:28.9	of faith and psychology.
1:30.2	And whether you're new to the podcast or you've been with us for a while, we're delighted
1:34.6	you're here.
1:35.6	All right, Bob.
	...

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