Reflection / Sean Gallagher

The Super Bowl commercial that could have and should have been

Because it’s been 15 years since the Indianapolis Colts have played in the Super Bowl, the attention of my boys and me when we watch it is often as much on the often-ballyhooed commercials played during it.

Some commercials (not a lot) have stuck in my memory because they highlighted well faith and family. For, as much as I love football, I love faith and family so much more.

Which leads me to a Coca Cola commercial I saw on social media a few hours before Super Bowl LIX last Sunday. (You can view it here: cutt.ly/Coke.)

It starts with a young married couple learning that they’re expecting their first child and then proceeds to show the challenges and changes they experience in their lives after their child is born.

Being woken up—again—in the middle of the night to care for the baby. The pain of stepping on unseen toys. Watching a young childless couple jogging in a park while the couple with the baby is pushing a stroller and weighed down with a diaper bag and baby toys. Discovering a favorite LP is covered with slime. Grabbing the now-toddler that has decided to eat dog food.

The commercial ends with the wife coming to her husband who is struggling to work while dealing with the demands of their toddler. She brings him lunch (including a Coke) and then holds before him a pregnancy test that shows that they’re expecting again.

The viewer first sees a look of shock on the face of the husband. But it soon turns into an expression of pure joy. The couple embraces, both so much happier than they were when they learned that they were pregnant the first time.

Throughout the whole commercial, the 1967 Bee Gees song “To Love Somebody” plays. As the commercial comes to its climax, the viewer hears these words from the song, “You don’t know what it’s like to love somebody the way I love you.”

When I saw the commercial, I hoped that it was going to be shown during the Super Bowl. But I soon learned that it was made in 2013 and aired in Argentina.

That was disappointing, because the message of the commercial was one that so many people in our culture need to hear in the winsome way it was presented.

Many young adults today hesitate to be open to the gift of life, or even consciously choose to avoid it, because they think that having a child will destroy their lives.

But here’s the thing. These young people are right.

So much of what young people think makes life great can often be boiled down to the autonomy to do what they want to do when they want to do it. And no doubt there can be a lot of good in that approach.

But all of that goes out the window when a baby comes along. The demands of a helpless little one forever change life in a million ways.

The amazing thing, though, is that it changes life in a million good ways that could never have been predicted before the baby came along. They’re not easy ways. They’re often very hard ways. But they’re good ways, ways that are joyful beyond our imagination.

They’re ways that, because they’re so transcendently good and joyful, can only come from God as a pure unearned gift.

A commercial that would highlight such a beautiful reality is the Super Bowl commercial that could have and should have been.
 

(Sean Gallagher is a reporter and columnist for The Criterion.) †