Faith keeps Eagles’ Wentz focused on something bigger

Injuries forced Carson Wentz to watch another quarterback lead the Philadelphia Eagles to their first Super Bowl title and put him on the sideline for playoff games in each of the next two seasons.

Now the franchise player with the big contract saw his team use a secondround pick on a quarterback who was runner-up for the Heisman Trophy last year.

The Eagles didn’t draft Jalen Hurts to compete with Wentz, only to provide insurance. That hasn’t stopped some media and fans from creating a quarterback controversy and interpreting the pick as a slight against Wentz.

Constant scrutiny and intense criticism are part of the job for NFL quarterbacks. In Philly, it’s loud and consistent.

But Wentz blocks it out. He doesn’t break. He won’t allow disappointment, frustration or setbacks to bring him down. Nor does he let success — he finished third in NFL MVP voting in 2017 and signed a contract extension with $108 million guaranteed last summer — inflate his ego.

The reason is his strong Christian faith.

“It can be easy to get consumed with your worldly, fleshly train of thought or desires or whatever,” Wentz explained in a wide-ranging interview with The Associated Press this week. “But when you look at everything from an internal perspective, from a Biblical perspective, and just know that this is so much bigger than just me and my life or where I’m at in my career, football, it’s so much bigger.

“It’s God’s perfect plan.

It’s his sovereignty interwoven with every one of our lives. And so for me to just fully trust, fully surrender (and say): ‘All right, God, I’m just here for surrender to you. And I want to give everything I can in my life to ultimately glorify you as best I can.’ It just gives me a different perspective with everything that comes my way, the good, the bad, the ugly. It’s not always the easiest to kind of have that train of thought. But the Bible talks about having a renewed mind. And so for me, that’s a daily thing to have my mind renewed by the Word and just fully surrender to the Lord.”

Wentz plans to embrace Hurts the same way he did Nick Foles, who became a Philly hero after earning Super Bowl MVP honors when he led the Eagles over the Patriots in February 2018.