

Posterized

By Andrew Larson

Copyright 2011 Andrew Larson

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 BRACKET

Every March, madness begins. I'm not talking about the beginning of the NCAA men's basketball tournament. I'm talking about Luther Vandross. More specifically, I'm talking about the thing my body does at the tournament's end, when CBS runs its highlight montage over the song "One Shining Moment", Luther Vandross' ode to college basketball. I confess when I first heard the song, I didn't know it was Luther, and I'm not convinced CBS knew either.

TV Executive: Luther, thanks so much for recording "One Shining Moment. " After all, you're a Grammy nominated artist, a multi-platinum record seller, and I respect that. I'm just such a fan. I really love that one song you sing about how cotton feels on your body. That's phenomenal.

Luther: How's that one go?

Exec: You know, "something, something, the fabric of our liiiiiives."

Luther: I think you're talking about Aaron Neville.

When 'One Shining Moment" starts playing, I become a musical werewolf, and R&B is the moon. All it takes is for the first words to hit my ears and the spirit of David Ruffin takes over my body, commanding me to dip my shoulder and sway like the first-ever white member of the Temptations. So by the time Mr. Vandross gets firing on all pistons and sings "...ONE SHINING MOMENT!" I've got a full blown case of 'diva hand', which is a real medical disease.

Here's what the Harvard Journal of Musical Pathology has listed under 'diva hand'

...presents abruptly with few known triggers. Initial presentation is a slight tremor of the hand at the wrist, with accompanying factors of humming or foot-tapping. More advanced cases see the hand become rigid and move up or down in conjunction with loud, 'I don't care who's looking!' styles of singing. Diva hand is not contagious except in large groups such as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Is a sister disease to head-banging and air guitar. Belongs to a family of diseases known as auto-pavlovian musical responses. See also, 'Beatlemania' and 'Bieber Fever'"

The other madness that March brings is the madness of deciphering why exactly your VP of Sales' wife won the office NCAA bracket pool. This is the same person who once asked if the NFL should draw a face on the football so that wide receivers could improve their catching skills by imagining it as a loved one. In her bracket she correctly picked the champion, called several of the first round upsets, and nailed the Elite Eight Cinderella team, all by asking which university in any given match-up is more haunted by ghosts.

Meanwhile, the genuine college basketball fan in the pool, you- the one who took in enough basketball to see Doug Gottlieb's entire wardrobe more often than his immediate family, the one who watched Holy Cross play Bucknell on your iPhone during your son's dedication ceremony- had your bracket trashed by the end of the second round. It makes no sense. You made intelligent, rational picks based on spreadsheets and calculations. You selected a sleeper based on hours of intense scouting and matchup comparisons. Yet your bracket is in flames and you're assailed by self-doubt, like some sports-crazed Hamlet, wondering how you could be losing to someone whose sleeper team is called the 'Banana Pelicans'. It's madness.

This madness is part of the NCAA tournament's appeal. Year after year, we celebrate its unpredictability- the upsets, the Cinderella runs by mid-majors, and the number of times a ref will ignore a blatant charge by a Duke player because Duke is God's new chosen people. Tournament time causes college basketball enthusiasts to yank out their hair, as all their expertise is laid siege to by a sophomore shooting guard from New Mexico A&M suddenly getting hot from 3 and upsetting the 2 seed. Chaos reigns. Nobody, but nobody, has any idea what's going on, least of all the experts.

Rece Davis: Digger, recap the upset of North Carolina by unheralded Wyoming Rodeo University.

Digger Phelps. Rece, I watched a lot of tape on North Carolina coming into this game. They really looked unbeatable. But nothing on that tape suggested that their shooting guard would go 0 for 24 from the field and then curl up on the floor, sobbing like a basket case.

Davis: When he lay down at center court with his teddy bear, that was a big turning point in the game.

Digger: All the momentum shifted when that happened. You could see Wyoming Rodeo start to play with some extra confidence.

Jay Bilas: The fact that Wyoming Rodeo was allowed to use their lariats in this game also gave them an edge. Their zone defense gained an extra dimension when they roped the Carolina center and tied him up like a calf. Several of those were borderline fouls.

Davis: Yeah, that was a grey area in the rules. Those referees probably won't ref another game in this tournament.

Digger: Jay, do you think Wyoming Rodeo's strategy of bringing the North Carolina shooting guard's long-lost father to the game and introducing them moments before tip-off had any effect on his play? Remember, he believed his father died in a rafting accident before his birth.

Bilas: Absolutely, I think it was a factor.

Christians love to know what's going on. Nothing makes us happier than to absolutely, totally, without question know what God is doing at any given time. If you asked a random sampling of non-Christians what the overall purpose of something or anything that's happening in their life at the moment, I imagine you would get an awful lot of "Oh, I don't know, man" and "Why did you bring me to Hardee's just to ask this?" But if you ask any Christian, without fail the majority will tell you that there is a 1 to 1 correlation between a life event and something God is trying to tell or teach them.

"Tyler won't sleep through the night. I'm just really being taught to be patient right now."

"My Hawaiian Shave Ice kiosk is not flourishing. I think God's trying to tell me to work in His strength and not my own."

"I wasn't picked to go on that short-term missions project. God just wants me to focus on my relationship with Him right now."

It's not just in our own lives where this tendency comes out; it's in the wider world as well. For example, there have been enough pop eschatology books written in the history of Christianity that we could wallpaper Thailand with the pages. I don't think Jesus could havebeen much plainer when he said that nobody knew the day or the hour of his return. Yet we call President Obama the anti-Christ and name Belgium as one of the seven stars on the crown because their waffles are too delicious, all in an effort to predict the end of the world. Why? It's not because we eagerly expect Christ's return. It's because we have to know what's going on. Always.

I'm the king of needing to know what's going on. I always have to know what God is up to in my life, to the point of acting in ways that are completely irrational. For instance, I can't listen to my car radio because I get convinced that whatever song is currently playing is talking directly about my situation and has been ordained by God to communicate to me in that moment. I can't tell you how many times, like a bona fide crazy person, I've parsed a random Gin Blossoms song for secret application meant just for my spiritual and earthly guidance.

Why? Because I can't just let life happen and let God be at work on my heart in His mysterious ways. I have to know- am compelled to know- what's going on all the time. Is He tackling my anger? What about my lust? Is He working on my patience, or my many idols, or my doubts, or my fearfulness? Which events in my life correspond to each? Which books can I read to better assist the process? How can I be more repentant so that the Holy Spirit's work isn't checked by me? And on it goes, ad infinitum.

I try to know because I think it's spiritual to know. Nobody wants to sit in church and admit "I have no idea what God is doing in my life, and I haven't for some time. Or ever, really." That looks like we're not trying, and if there's a cardinal sin in church, that's the one.

The madness of God's work in the world and in our lives is that we honestly don't know what's going on most of the time. Consider that confusion is one of the most common themes in the Bible. Imagine Abraham looking at the stars. Or Moses at the burning bush. Or the Israelites in Lamentations. Or Jonah responding to Nineveh's mass conversion. Or Mary talking to the angel Gabriel. Or the disciples practically all the time. Do they seem to have a firm grasp on what God is up to? Could they have written a book on knowing the will of God that would sell in LifeWay? Could they deliver a sermon in synagogue that would satisfy the congregation, or tear up the lecture circuit, or double as a successful podcast? I doubt it.

The NCAA tournament is fun because it mocks our ability to analyze it and predict the outcome. How it unfolds is always completely different from the way we think it will. We smile when a true sleeper surprises us, or when a result baffles the experts. We never know what's happening, and so we don't obsess over the question, which gives us the freedom to enjoy it. God asks the same attitude of us. But I still wonder if bracket-picking is a spiritual gift.

 TAE KWON DO

I wish I'd known that tae kwon do was for kids before I started doing it.

The first thing I noticed when I showed up on the first day of class were all the children everywhere. It looked like 'Jon and Kate + Albuquerque'. I thought a Bakugon truck jackknifed on the highway next door.

Look, I know that, technically, tae kwon do is for people of all ages. I have no doubt that an actual black belt can generate some serious self-defense if necessary ("Your elbow joint will regain normal function in several weeks. From now on, do not reach for the same DiGiorno's pizza as I"). But the fact remains, when I look around, I can only draw one conclusion: I'm learning martial arts at a KinderCare.

I shouldn't have been surprised. Tae kwon do is now as dominant a part of suburban childhood as Mr. Rogers or stealing candy from Walgreens. The parking lots of most dojos look like Land Rover dealerships. If one caught fire, we would lose half of all the existing copies of 'Eat, Pray, Love.' What will the next generation of Americans look like? I'll tell you: they will all have flawless axe kick techniques, lacrosse jerseys and no idea how to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

From the Korean, the literal translation of 'tae kwon do' is "martial arts for those who fear pain", which makes it perfect for me. When you fight someone in tae kwon do, they pad you up until you look like Joy Behar- the headgear alone looks like the bouncy castle from a princess-themed birthday party. Once you add in the white cloak that doubles as the uniform, the total effect says, "I'm here for the costume party. If there's a fight, don't panic, I'm a level 51 cleric with +14 fetal position bonus." Threatening, you are not.

And the whole time you're fighting ("Did you put all the pads on? Safety first!." "No kicking in the arm!"), the guys who do muay thai are 8 feet away, aiming roundhouse kicks at each other's jaw and laughing about the blood in their stool from the night before. It's an amazing scene. It's like an accounting group doing a team-building exercise with the Oakland Raiders.

So it turns out I accidentally decided to learn a toddler's martial art. I'm not losing sleep over it- I look young anyway. When I buy a bottle of scotch at a liquor store, the guys at the counter tell me I'm adorable and ask what science fair project I'm working on. When I mail in my taxes, the IRS sends them back and tells me I can keep my allowance. So if tae kwon do is for 11 year olds, I can roll with that. Plus, adult participation in something that's meant for children is not unusual for me anyway. I'm a Christian.

The Gospel of Mark records the story of Jesus blessing the children. Some parents brought their children to Jesus for him to bless, but the disciples turned them away, thinking he had more important things to do. Jesus notices this and corrects them. "Let the children come to me. The Kingdom of God belongs to such as these," he said. "Anyone who will not receive the Kingdom of God like a little child will not enter it."

When we say something is 'childish', it's not a compliment. It means we think something is simple, unsophisticated, beneath the station of an adult, as in, "Why does Barry always brag about his SAT scores while he's playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on Xbox Live? It's so childish." Sophistication is complication, and adulthood is all about complicating things. We adults don't save money, we invest. We don't just relax; we do yogalates with the optional chakra alignment. We don't just hang out, we have a cocktail party with hors d'ouevres and a piano man playing "Welcome To the Jungle". We don't just hunt, we smear doe urine on our legs and use rifles that make Civil War muskets look like paper footballs. Nothing simple there. It's all very complicated. Very grown-up.

I think we read this story and gloss over it sometimes. "Yes, yes, bring the children to Jesus. Why not? He loves kids, they're adorable- or mine is, at least. Let him kiss some heads and maybe play some patty-cake, and then he'll get down to business. How serious a passage of Scripture could this be, anyway? We use it to dismiss our kids for their 'special time of worship' before the adults get serious and listen to the sermon."

We're like the disciples. We don't really think Jesus values child-like faith. His time is more valuable than that. He wants us doing more important things, more mature things. So we do our grown up faith instead, with all its eschatology, and soteriology, and other serious theological considerations. We put so many moving parts on our faith that it's like a Rube Goldberg machine. It takes gears and sprockets and wrenches and blueprints to build a faith that flies, we say. It can't be as easy as pixie dust.

Why? Because we're adults. We don't do childish things. And a faith that just sits and receives love from God, one that trusts that Jesus died for every single one of our sins and then lives from that place, is just that. Christianity can't be childish. It should be sophisticated. Complicated. Hard. Grown-up.

Following Jesus is like my tae kwon do class. It's adult participation in something that's meant for children. "Anyone who will not receive the Kingdom of God like a little child will not enter it." Jesus says plainly that the heart of faith in him is childish. The psalmist echoes this inPsalm 131, saying "I have stilled and quieted my soul. Like a weaned child is my soul within me."

I'll keep going to tae kwon do. I like it, and it doesn't matter that it sometimes looks like they're training an orphan army, and I'll get over the awkwardness that comes when I practice my knife hand strikes next to an 11 year old. Plus, it reminds me that the door to the Kingdom is two and a half feet tall, plastic and sticky and caked with mud. Am I coming in?

POSTERIZED

Sometimes I wonder who invented getting posterized.

The smart aleck answer is, 'the poster', although the question of whether the poster created posterization, or whether the concept of getting posterized existed before the poster gave it expression is one that philosophers have been arguing about since antiquity.

Plato: I'm glad we could all assemble here in Ancient Greece. I just wanted to make sure everyone was clear on my philosophical teaching that the universal ideal of 'posterization' is independently real of the particular act of posterizing somebody.

Socrates: I think we are confused, actually.

Confucius: I'm definitely confused. I'm on the wrong continent. Has anyone seen my little cookies anywhere?

Plato: Let me clarify. Posterizing is what happens when a basketball player dunks on another with such force that, on a poster of the moment, one player is captured in the dunking act, while the other is usually falling down or cowering in the corner of the photo. Socrates, a good example is that poster you have of Achilles about to club the Trojan warrior; the one where he's oiled up and flexing.

Socrates: I don't have that poster. I don't know what you're talking about.

Plato: So what I'm saying is that when Clippers power forward Blake Griffin drop-steps on Anderson Varejao in the low post and makes him his girlfriend, Blake Griffin's posterization is merely the imperfect embodiment of a larger abstraction known as 'posterizing'.

Aristotle\- I see where you're coming from, Plato, but I have an important question which philosophers such as ourselves have been wrestling with for ages: what about Tim Hardaway's crossover dribble? We called it the UTEP Two-Step. It had nothing to do with dunking.

Plato: Many things can be considered 'posterizing', not just dunking on somebody. Each individual act is a rendering of something larger, more elemental. When we see a defender get his ankles broken, we recognize instinctively that he was just posterized. How? Because it represents the larger ideal of posterization.

Socrates: Look, my mom gave me that poster. It's the only reason I hung it up. I don't like Achilles or anything.

Confucius: Both of you should take a page from my book- if you say practically nothing, there's nothing to argue about. For example, take my saying, "Use 'no way' as a way." Who can argue with that? It's six words long. It's not even a haiku.

Aristotle: Bruce Lee said that, actually. Plato, consider what I call the Third Man Fallacy, which came to me while I was watching an Orson Welles marathon. If all different kinds of posterizing are representations of an ideal Posterization, we only know that because that ideal itself is in relation to another, larger ideal of Posterization, and so on to infinity. Your argument is refuted. Boom!

Plato: Fascinating. I think I just got posterized.

Aristotle's point about Tim Hardaway aside, most posterizations are dunks. Elevating for a real dunk is a heady, electrifying experience, but it's one typically reserved for those with the spiritual gift of hops. I personally have no chance of ever dunking a basketball, except, perhaps, on the surface of the moon.

This is partially because I'm Swedish. Swedes are good people, honest and straightforward, excellent at drinking coffee, but in the leaping category, we make the Budweiser Clydesdales look like pole vaulters. At the Stockholm police department, running hurdles is actually an interrogation technique. And Swedish high jumpers have been banned from Olympic competition since 1964, when one competitor set the Scandinavian high-jump record at 2.1 feet, got an altitude nosebleed and nearly died.

The other problem is that I grew up on a street named 'Holly Springs' in a neighborhood that was whiter than a mini-marathon**. Nobody has ever dunked a basketball that lived on a street named for either a flower or a naturally occurring water phenomenon. It just hasn't happened. Kevin Harlan has never shouted into his microphone, as a player loaded up a hellacious breakaway dunk, "Buckle up for Andrew Larson! Straight from Carnation Meadows- with no regard for human life!"

**--Would also accept "... the smiles in Guideposts magazine", "... Kanye West's fan base."

Now, if you grew up in playing basketball in a place with a little more street cred, you're probably asking yourself, "What's the big deal about dunking?" You're bored of dunks. The very idea of dunking gives you ennui out your De Gaulle. It's entirely possible you've been posterizing people and dunking basketballs for your entire life. You might be dunking at this very moment, even while reading this**. If so, I'd like to be your agent.

**-- Let's see someone in the dunk contest try that.

Posterization is about helplessness. It's that moment, captured in a photograph, where one player is completely humbled by another. There is the dunker, in flight like Phaeton, above the one who is being dunked on, who can only watch the action unfold from below as he is beaten. Posterizing someone is fun. Being posterized, on the other hand, is not.

That helplessness is at the core of the Christian's experience with sin. The best known expression of it comes from Romans 7. The apostle Paul, in his discussion about the Law and sin, says these words:

"(v. 15) I don't really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don't do it. Instead, I do what I hate.... (v. 17-21) And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. I want to do what is right, but I can't. I want to do what is good, but I don't. I don't want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway. But if I do what I don't want to do, I am not really the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it. I have discovered this principle of life—that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong."

Smack in the middle of a treatise on the relationship between the Law and man's sin nature, Paul reasons his way to a place of surprising frankness.  If I know one thing, it's that I don't get myself. I know the right thing to do, but I don't do it. Something inside me wants to do something else, and so I do that instead. Everywhere I look inside me, sin is winning.

It's hard to know if Paul's tone here is didactic or confessional. Is it the calm voice of a teacher, or the anguished cry of a beaten perfectionist? The point is clear in either case: by his own admission, at the core of the life of Paul- Paul the indefatigable missionary, Paul the firebrand defender of the Gospel, Paul the chosen apostle to evangelize the Gentiles- is the fact that sin continues to posterize him.

For most Christians the experience is the same. Our minds are made up: we are following Jesus. Our hearts have been transformed, our wills baptized into an awareness of the presence of God in our lives. And yet, we fail. Anger surges over our dams of self-control and peace. Lust blows off the storm windows off our supposed purity. Pride quakes down all our reinforced buildings of humility. Everywhere we turn, in some crevice of our lives, we find sin leaping high above us, dunking with glee on our best efforts at trying to be good. No amount of spiritual elbow grease can change it. Our honest efforts at the Christian life are a sham- we are getting posterized, over and over again.

The power of sin lies in the poster. Sin papers the walls of our heart with picture after picture of the times it has dominated our willpower. Our good works are no match. Any posters of our victories over sin are sparse by comparison. As a shrine to our good moments- calling timeout while falling out of bounds, or shooting underhanded, Rick Barry free throws- they embarrass us with their measliness. Meanwhile, wherever we look, the posters of sin condemn us with the volume of our failures. Paul asks at the end of Romans 7, 'Who can save me from this body of death?", but he may as well ask, "What can anyone do about all these posters?"

The power of sin lies in the poster. The power of Christ over sin and death is that it coats the walls of our heart in Teflon. No posters will hang up- not of sin's power over us, nor of our own personal goodness. In their place come the famous words that begin Romans chapter 8, and put an end to the problem of posterization from Romans 7: "Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus..."

What can anyone do about all these posters? It was Paul's cry, and also that of every Christian who still struggles with sin. It's the wish of every non-Christian who wants to be made right with God but doesn't know how. It was the desire of every Jew from the time of Abraham that ever sacrificed a burnt offering. What can anyone do about all these posters?

The cross of Jesus eradicates posterization forever. We've heard it said that our sins will be cast to the bottom of the sea, or as far as the east is from the west, but maybe we need to hear it another way: no longer can our sins taunt us from the walls of our hearts. The staple gun has been taken away. The posters never stay up.

LEATHER

The day you receive your first baseball glove is a beautiful rite of passage into boyhood.

It can be other things too, of course. It may be that first moment when you realize that your dad is a relentless stage father, although that realization typically comes later, such as when you notice that your homemade quesadillas are always stuffed with Big League Chew, or that you are wearing eye black in all of your baby photos. It can also be a reality check for your father, as in a situation where you are actually a girl, you resent being named after Tug McGraw, and it's time for him to admit that your ballet recitals are not "spring training".

But mostly it's a powerful coming-of-age moment. Of course, the beauty of that moment is immediately ruined by the fact that new baseball gloves cannot be used by anyone of normal human strength. We think that just anyone can close a baseball glove shut because pro ballplayers do it with ease. But this is only because they have done massive amounts of steroids, mostly derived from brontosaurus chromosomes. Those players could squeeze the quadratic formula and get Fermat's Last Theorem. A five year old boy versus his Weapon X glove stands no chance.

Since these new baseball gloves are armor plated, to use them one first must first "break in" the glove. The first step is to pour neatsfoot oil, or lanolin, onto the glove to soften the leather, although if neither is available, Valvoline 10W30 works just as well. After the application of oil, father and son commit acts of increasing violence on the glove in an effort to make it more pliable, similar to an IRS audit. Most experts suggest placing a ball in the webbing of the glove to form the "pocket", and then repeatedly dropping a baby grand piano on it. It should be noted that Steinway does not endorse this method and recommends using a pipe organ instead, although they do not say how.

I'm certain people would change the breaking-in process if they could. But the one thing nobody would change about a baseball glove is the way it smells. The aroma of a baseball glove is pure magic. There's a reason that 'Shoeless' Joe Jackson mentions in it in the movie 'Field of Dreams', and it's not because he was hopped up on corn allergies and ghost Claritin. The smell of baseball glove leather has a strange power over men. In fact, if women could somehow create a perfume that smells like baseball glove, there would be no single ladies left in America. If they're smart, they're already working on it.

**GREG** : Did you guys hear about Russell? He's getting married.

**LARRY** : To that one girl? The welfare queen with the beer gut?

**TOM** : That's her.

**LARRY** : What? How? Russell rowed crew at Dartmouth. His hedge fund outperformed the Dubai GDP last year. He told me that he was only going out with her once, as a dare. He said it right to my face.

**GREG** : Yeah, but she was wearing the new _Eau du Rawlings._ Poor guy never stood a chance.

**LARRY:** Oh, that's powerful stuff. Last week I nearly tackled a woman at the mall who was wearing the Rickey Henderson version- you know, the 'nachos' one?- but the three guys already with her knocked me out cold. I think she was the one.

**TOM** : No surprise there. I mean, look at Greg and his wife. She got him by smearing pine tar all over herself at their senior prom.

**GREG** : She sure did. It went exactly 18 inches up her arm, like the rules of baseball say. I liked that.

**LARRY** : Speaking of which, Tom, how did your date the other night go?

**TOM:** Not good. She had that 'Can of Tennis Balls' perfume on. I think we'll just be friends.

But the baseball glove is more than just an untapped resource for world domination by the fairer sex. It's also a powerful symbol of God's love.

The Bible says that God loves us. That's a foundational Christian truth. The idea that we matter to God in a personal way fills page after page of Scripture, and that's great for it to say. For some people, that's all they need to hear. They'll say "Oh, the Bible says God cares about me. I guess it must be that way then!" and then go along, never wondering about it again for another second of their lives. I envy those people. I'm not one of them. Sometimes I wonder.

I used to be really angry about being a Christian because I thought I'd been tricked. I felt like Christianity was a bait-and-switch job where I'd been told about a God of love, and then after I'd promised my life to Him, He turned out to be a drill sergeant who was mad because I was always doing it wrong. And so I was stuck. I couldn't go anywhere, because God was real. I believed that. But I also believed that His _modus_ _operandi_ was to sign people up, and then hold them to impossible standards of behavior for the rest of their lives. The only reward was to go to heaven at the end, and that only if you managed to make it that far without breaking down.

God felt a lot of things about me, I was sure. He was exasperated with me. He expected more from me. Tolerated me. Was frequently embarrassed by me. But under no circumstances did He like me very much, let alone love me or care about me at all. So what if the Bible said he did? I'd never seen it. Had I missed something?

I had, indeed. As it so happens, leather is God's love language.

In the Easter story, before Jesus' crucifixion, he was first tortured by Roman soldiers. The Gospel accounts record how the guards struck Jesus with their fists, spit on him and beat him with a club. On top of that, they whipped him. The whip of this time period was a "cat o' nine tails", a thick cord handle that bloomed into nine separate strands, each tipped with lead hooks. And it was made of leather.

At the beginning of Jesus' ministry, John the Baptist prophesied Jesus' coming Messiah-ship. But some people misunderstood and thought _John_ was the coming Messiah. And so he answered them this way:

"The people were waiting expectantly and were all wondering in their hearts if John might possibly be the Messiah. John answered them all, "I baptize you with water. But one who is more powerful than I will come, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie."

When John testified that he was unworthy to touch Jesus' sandals, he spoke a powerful message about a God whose ways and character were infinitely different from his own. This Jesus is so awesome and holy that even the leather on his shoes is untouchable to me.

For many years I knew that I, too, was unworthy to touch the sandal straps of Jesus. Nobody had to tell me this. Undeserving-ness was a fact- the fact- of my life. I knew it instinctively. Further, the concept of God dying on my behalf didn't always dispel that feeling in the way that preachers assumed it should. After all, Jesus was also omnipotent God. If He dies, coming back to life is probably not that hard for Him. So what did that show me, really? I knew I was unworthy. But my question still persisted. Was I worth anything to God?

Leather is what answered that question. At the hands of the Romans, Jesus let leather scourge His body, where once leather had adorned it. God incarnate allowed a symbol of His perfection become a tool to humiliate him. The cross showed me a God who died for me, but the whip showed me a God who would give up his majesty for me.

Our salvation is not a cosmic technicality. It's not like God said "I wish I didn't have to save these guys, but we checked the paperwork here and it turns out that I'm perfectly love, so I've got to beam down and get crucified. BRB, cherubs." And we're not incidental to the equation, either, as if the Easter story only happened so everyone would know how awesome God is, and we just happened to be sitting in the audience when it happened.

No, before Jesus died to take our sins, he was whipped. And in the whipping He showed us our value to Him. God _chose_ to let nothing stand in His way, not even His holiness. He laid everything down to get us. He came to save us from sin and death, and to blaze a salvation trail we could walk in. He would do it because he loves us. Loves you. Loves me. The leather proves it.

The beginning of baseball season and the Easter season often coincide. It's probably just a fluke of the calendar, but maybe not. After all, baseball has every element of the Easter story in play: grass, horsehide, wood- and leather. So the next time you watch a game, pay attention to the huge Easter symbols on the players' hands- and control yourself around the women wearing baseball glove perfumes.

SLUMP

Nobody in the universe is cockier than a pedestrian in a crosswalk.

Your average person, when approaching a busy street, has a healthy attitude of caution. Their brain analyzes the variables and flashes two thoughts on to the cerebral JumboTron:

1) Those cars are moving very fast.

2) I remember what roadkill looks like.

So most people plan their street crossings with the precision of a jewel heist. At any given time at an intersection, the intensity of tactical planning going on makes the Joint Chiefs of Staff look like a flash mob. If Starbucks could harness this strategic power, they would finally find a way to graft espresso makers onto our thighs and then debit our bank accounts for it.

But inside a crosswalk, something changes. Normal street traversers become Kanye West pedestrians, drunk with their power to halt multiple tons of steel with a single step. The crosswalk's magic turns what should be a Frogger-esque race across six lanes of danger into an asphalt Lazy River. Instead of sprinting for their life, people float from one side to the other, fully aware that if any any car touches them, they will lawyer up and feed that driver's life savings to the pinball machines.

This is the cockiness that makes people hate pedestrians in crosswalks. And it's the cockiness I hope you'll forgive when I say this:

I just don't go through slumps.

Other people do, or so I'm told. I don't know what that feels like. I'm sorry. I can't empathize with this phenomenon of "going through a slump". I've only ever heard rumors that such a thing exists. Sometimes friends will confide that they have had periods where "things didn't go quite right", but the concept eludes me. My entire life has been an uninterrupted symphony of winning, and there are no false notes in the movements. Slumps? I can't fathom them. Je ne comprends, mon frere.

Sure, there was that stretch from elementary school until college where any social contact with girls was a little erratic. But that was mainly due to watching 'Say Anything' and assuming that it was an instruction manual on effectively courting ladies, when it is, in fact, the opposite**. There was also the 2.7 GPA from my career in higher learning, a hiccup I could have avoided had I not tried to go as long as possible each semester without buying any textbooks. And I'm definitely not counting the forty one consecutive games of online Risk I once lost to my friend Matt because- in my defense- I was supposed to be working at the time.

**- Young men, take note. If I ever become rich, I want to establish the Foundation for Men Whose Game Was Radically Damaged By John Cusack Movies. Our meetings will fill up the Pontiac Silverdome.

But I'm ignoring all that. The point is that slumps don't happen to me, they happen to other people. Specifically, athletes.

Athletes are our best examples of slumps because so much of what they do is quantifiable. Also, like the first American colonists, results alone dictate their success. In the sports world, you're either getting it done or you're not. There's not much room for argument. A three-point specialist sporting an 0-20 streak from beyond the arc can't debate the numbers. '0-20' doesn't mean he's a bad three-point shooter, but at the moment, he's shooting threes badly. His current performance is falling short of his usual standards. He's in a slump.

Facing some kind of slump, everyone's first instinct is to change something in the way they play, unless they are a United States Congressperson, in which case the solution involves borrowing massive sums of money from China. But in fact, changing approach only prolongs the slump. A basketball player who counters a poor shooting streak by altering his shot mechanics always prolongs the agony. Any baseball player who overhauls his swing to combat a slump just compounds the problem.

In both cases, the player misunderstands the nature of what is happening. Generally speaking, the way out of a slump is not changing everything. The way out is persistence.

In Paul's letter to the Galatian church, he ends his remarks with a section that encourages the Galatians to live rightly. After instructions on correcting another wayward believer (gently, Paul says) and how to evaluate their lives (pay attention to yourself, not to others), he caps the section with an agricultural metaphor:

"... You will always harvest what you plant. Those who live only to satisfy their own sinful nature will harvest decay and death from that sinful nature. But those who live to please the Spirit will harvest everlasting life from the Spirit.  So let's not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don't give up." (Gal. 6: 7-9, italics mine)

Christians flip out a little bit when we read the parts of the Bible that tell us to do good things. It seems like half of us are fleeing from a legalistic brand of Christianity, and the other half of us are determined not to go that way ourselves, which leaves us wound a little tight.

For example, when I was in college, a professor almost didn't show up to give us a final exam. In classic "this could only happen at a Christian college" fashion, after 20 minutes of professorial absence, all 50 students remained in the classroom. Not one person left. No one moved a single Birkenstock-ed toe. To this day, I can't believe it really happened. At any other school, the students would have overrun some hapless TA while leaving the room, like rioting serfs, and hogtied him as a warning to the administration.

We couldn't contain our growing delight over the professor's truancy. Was this really happening? What are the rules here? No professor, no final, right?** We knew we were dodging a bullet- the course had been difficult, and the final was reputed to be a GPA assassin. But soon our inexperience showed. We didn't know what the next move should be- stay or go? - and conflict soon harshed everyone's buzz.

**- I know what you're thinking, and, sadly, Saved By the Bell lied about that whole 'five minute rule' thing.

We divided into factions and bickered about what to do, speaking mostly in action movie cliches. " _We have to get out of here, we're running out of time" "_ **'** _But if you do this, you're no different from anyone else! It doesn't have to end this way!" "If we want to survive, we need to leave right now!! Just STAY TOGETHER!"_

Stay together, we did. After an hour we were still there, all of us, with half of the allotted test-taking time elapsed. The stand-off ended when, under cover of argument, a sophomore slipped away and called the professor at home. He arrived, disheveled from over-sleeping, and promptly administered the exam with no bonus time and no grading curve.

And that's how Christians feel when we stumble onto the parts of the Bible telling us to be good. It's like thinking we had a free pass on a final exam, only to find out that we have to take it after all- and knowing it will demolish us. It's discouraging.

Life compounds the discouragement. The most common feedback the world has for our good actions is indifference. It may be true that no good deed goes unpunished, but it's truer that most good deeds go unnoticed. Worse yet, accumulating good deeds doesn't seem to help us avoid life's calamities. 'Rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous alike' as the Psalmist says. So, absent any visible cause-and-effect, how can Paul honestly encourage the Galatian church, and us by proxy, to keep going in doing good? How can he tell us to continue follow Jesus through life's slumps?

He can do it because God owns the soil.

Paul's use of farming language echoes the words of Jesus in Matthew 9, where Jesus refers to God as the "Lord of the harvest", alluding to the many people that were ready to hear Jesus' teachings and be saved. Later, in John 12, Jesus foretells his death by saying that "unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds."

By persisting in obedience to God to his death, Jesus secured the salvation harvest by being the seed that falls to the ground that God placed under curse back in Genesis. He was pleased to sow Jesus into the spiritual soil of the world, and after his resurrection Paul calls Jesus "the firstfruits" of God's kingdom- a farming term. Because Jesus died and rose again, God repossessed the soil.

Likewise, when we sow our good deeds into the world, as Paul tells us, we sow it, not into hardpan that yields only thistles and frustration, but into rich loam that Jesus' obedience unto death has tilled to fertility. "Don't tire of doing good..." Paul says, and he can say that with confidence, because Jesus drains the word 'tire' of its spiritual connotations:

1)  Exertion. Because Jesus' death means that our salvation is secure, He removes the physical fatigue of racking up good work after good work in an effort to earn it. We can stop the frenzy of activity that surrounds working so hard to please God, and catch our breath. He's pleased in Jesus, and that's enough. No need to get tired out.

2)  Patience. Just as Jesus' resurrection secures the harvest of salvation, it also secures a harvest of blessing. This promise removes the taxation of our mental strength that comes from thinking that our actions are futile. Whether we see it or not, nothing is wasted in God's economy, least of all the things we do. Our attempts at obedience are not fruitless, or in vain. So when the slumps come where nothing goes right, don't stop doing good. Keep trying.

In both cases, discouragement is banished, and encouragement reigns. Though obeying God seems like a daunting task, we can do it, because, through Jesus' persistence, God owns the land. Or, as the old hymn says, "... _This is my Father's world. O let me ne'er forget that though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet."_

SPIKE

My brother and I once decided that we wanted to play in a beach volleyball tournament.

I'm not sure where that decision came from. Certainly not from reality, where our major qualifications for volleyball success were:

1) When standing in good light, my brother looks like a leaner Channing Tatum. In bad light, he just looks like the Silver Surfer in profile, but with less body fat.

2) In college, I once had an ill-advised crush on Logan Tom, Stanford's six-foot-one volleyball prodigy. Proportionally speaking, this was like a sidewalk deli falling in love with the Empire State Building. She could have picked me up and carried me around in a Vera Bradley bag like a baby kangaroo.

Luckily, lack of qualification has never stopped either of us from pursuing anything that we wanted to do, such as attend prom. As a breed of man, we are of the "go for it" variety. We say that, if something is worth doing, it is also worth getting in way over your head for. Our entire lives are LiveStrong bracelets.

That volleyball tournament taught us a lot. For one, it turns out that if you host a beach volleyball tournament in Kentucky, it's likely that the other players will fall well short of the standard of sexiness that is mandated by most pro events. This was a big deal because the AVP is very serious about policing the attractiveness of their competitors. It is at the top of their priority list, right alongside negotiating sponsorship deals with bronzing lotions. If they had scouted this tournament, they would have discovered that it violated bylaw 6.15, section 3, under the heading "Failure To Utilize Model-Hot Athletes For Volleyball Tourney/Possible Impromptu Fashion Show" and shut it down immediately.

We also learned that, when it comes to competition, most people will not respect the 'A', 'B' and 'C' divisions of play. My brother and I registered to play in the 'C' division, which we thought was appropriate for two people who spent ninety percent of their practice time either attempting to jump-serve (me) or get a tan (him). Thus, in the 'C' division, we expected to compete against players with an equally shallow grasp on the nuances of competitive volleyball. So imagine our surprise when all our opponents came out spiking on us.

Let's be real for a minute. If you're good at volleyball, you know it. I don't think it's something you can be unaware of. You can't be like, "Look, I realize that I'm hovering near the net and unloading laser-targeted spikes like a volleyballing Apache helicopter, but believe me, I'm as shocked about it as you are." Skills like that don't just show up overnight. So when you're playing in the C division of a volleyball tournament and setting the ball to your teammate with the velvet touch of an obstetrician, maybe- just maybe- you're sandbagging a little.

So needless to say, we didn't win the tournament. Or a single game. The aforementioned sandbagging meant that we spent most of our playing time scrambling around the court like a kitten chasing a flashlight beam and having wordless conversations with our eyes that went like this:

**JON** : I thought you were good!

**ME** : No, I thought YOU were supposed to be good!

**JON** : No, I'm awful. But you're not very good either?

**ME** : I know, I'm terrible! So does that mean that NEITHER OF US is good?

**JON** : There's an excellent chance that neither one of us is good here.

But we had a lot of fun, and we met a lot of very cool people, some of whom may even have been gainfully employed at the time, although there was no visible evidence to prove it. In fact, I would call the entire morning as a success, except for one thing: for as much as we were spiked on, neither one of us ever spiked the ball ourselves.

That's a shame, because spiking is really fun. Everyone loves to spike. I don't care whether you're a seasoned pro or a backyard jungle-baller, when a volleyball is in the air near the net, you just want to jump up and send it towards somebody's face with an act of violence. And when you get all aerial for that spike, you know that everything in the game freezes. Every eye is on you, fan and foe alike. What will you do? Will you scatter your opponents with a mega-swing, or demoralize them with a controlled strike into the corner? It's your choice. Whatever you choose, one thing is certain: at that moment of impact, it's all about you. You've got the attention. It's your time to shine.

Because spiking is such a moment of glory, we often forget to ask this follow-up question: how did the ball get in the air in the first place? The answer is, 'a person set it there.' A spike is only one half of the equation for attacking volleyball. Without the soft parabola of the set, there's no hard line of a spike. Only the spike gets to be the show-stopper. The set must content itself to be the prelude.

In John 13, the apostle John recounts the story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. At this point in the Gospel story, Jesus has mostly concluded his public ministry. He has caused such a stir in the region that people were plotting to kill him, ultimately with success. At his final Passover meal, Jesus stripped down, knelt with a basin of water and cleaned the feet of each apostle. And after he finished, he said this:

"Do you understand what I was doing? You call me 'Teacher' and 'Lord,' and you are right, because that's what I am. And since I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash each other's feet. I have given you an example to follow. Do as I have done to you....I tell the truth, servants are not greater than their masters."

Serving people is hard. Our culture daily urges us to spike, not to set. The message to us is to "grow your personal brand", "increase your platform" and "go get yours". If we are to have a good life, we are told, we had better get on with what is flashy, or eye-catching, or what generates interest in ourselves. If no one is paying attention or praising us, it is assumed that we are living some kind of withered, inferior half-life, badly in need of an excitement infusion. A life of service is met with an arched eyebrow and a sidelong glance. ' _You consider others better than yourself?'_ people ask. _'That makes no sense._ _Why are you setting when you could be spiking_?'

My spiking ways are notorious. I once volunteered at a local soup kitchen, but never went back because I wasn't "getting anything out of it", meaning that not enough people were impressed when I told them what I did. When some college friends of mine started a branch of the Lion's Club and asked me to be on the leadership team, I agreed, but mostly ignored it because it wasn't exciting work and it cramped my social schedule. Two perfect setting opportunities, ruined because I only wanted to do things that enhanced my own profile.

Jesus' disciples weren't immune to this, either. In Luke's Gospel account, the writer records a squabble between some of the disciples over who among them would be the greatest in God's future kingdom. Isn't that amazing? Even with a front row seat to the life of Jesus, his closest followers succumbed to the hype of being in the inner circle of an exceptional person. Self-importance carried the day. Spiking won out over setting with the twelve Founding Fathers of Christianity. It happens to the best of us.

When Jesus took soap and tub in hand, he modeled for his disciples a lifestyle of servanthood that subverted any obsession with a life of spiking.  _I didn't come here to spike the ball, but to set it. Nobody is better than the best player, and that's me- so do what I do. Don't mess around with trying to be a superstar all the time. Follow my lead, and help others have the glory._

We can be encouraged that Jesus touched these men's feet in the first place. This Bible vignette shows us a Savior down on his knees, willing to serve and to teach his friends. Likewise, Jesus washes our feet, ignoring the muddy failures of our past and future, modeling for us the setting life that forsakes self-importance and washes the feet of others. He calls us away from a life in pursuit of spike after spike, trying to chain together experiences that show everyone how great we are, and beckons us towards acts of service in the shadow of the volleyball net.

 MENDOZA

One of the things most people don't know about Kansas City is that it's not just an hour away from St. Louis.

It is, in fact, on the other side of Missouri from St. Louis, adjacent to the state of Kansas, which is contiguous with the Pacific Ocean, and therefore seems as far away as Guam. This means that, theoretically, if someone** were to drive from Louisville, Kentucky to Kansas City for a soccer tryout, that person would have to drive ALL THE WAY across Indiana, ALL THE WAY across Missouri, and then ALL THE WAY back. No doubt, this theoretical someone would be very upset to discover the true location of Kansas City halfway into his trip. He would also be very worried that Lowe Elementary might revoke the bronze medal from his fifth grade geography bee. And he would probably start playing Carmen San Diego again, just to brush up.

**- Not me. Seriously. Just walk away.

It's helpful to know that Lewis and Clark made this same geography mistake. When they set out on their westward trek, historians tell us that Meriweather Lewis exhorted his team to push on through Missouri territory by saying that "the Pacific is just beyond this giant metallic arch!" We don't whether Lewis intentionally lied or not, although we do know that the Lewis and Clark team then wandered in circles around Missouri for years, like an expeditionary Daytona 500. They didn't get back out again until they met a Native American woman named Sacajawea, who explained that, in order to get to the Pacific, Lewis and Clark would have to take her with them. They agreed, and today we honor Sacajawea as history's first recorded gold-digger, which is why her face is on the dollar coin.

I'm also unsure if people know that Kansas City has a baseball team, the Royals. This is potentially because, for the last fifteen to twenty years, the Royals have been abject in every possible way related to baseball. If the Royals were a stock brokerage, they would be investing in cryogenics start-ups and bootleg DVD cartels.

But they used to be good, especially back when Hall of Famer George Brett played third base for them. Along with making one of the last serious runs at hitting above .400 for a season and raising awareness for pine-tar use, Brett is often credited with popularizing a fun part of the baseball lexicon: the Mendoza Line.

Mario Mendoza played shortstop in the late Seventies and early Eighties. During his journeyman career he gained a reputation as an elite fielding, weak-hitting player whose batting average hovered around .200 in any given season. So, as legend has it, when reporters asked George Brett about his statistics, he would reply, "The first thing I do in the morning is check the newspaper to see who is below the Mendoza Line." The term caught on, and is now common baseball slang for hitting above or below .200 for a season.

Children today cannot even fathom this concept of a .200 hitter playing major league baseball. To them, a batting average that pathetic is as mythological as ballpark hot dogs that cost less than $11. These kids have only known a world where ballplayers injected themselves with top-secret performance enhancers, similar to the way Marvel Comics originated Captain America. A .200 hitter at the major league level? Don't make them put down their one gallon energy drinks and LOL right in your digital face.

But unless the Wikipedia is lying, Mario Mendoza was extremely real. And today, the sum total of his major league career is a slang term, derived from his futility at one-half of his profession. There's a mystery in that futility that's worth exploring, one that Mendoza himself must have wondered about on occasion. "Why am I only half good at baseball? How can hands that scoop grounders with ease be so worthless when it comes to swinging a bat?"

Jeremiah was the most futile prophet that the Old Testament records. There is a reason he is called the "wailing prophet", and it's not because he was the inspiration for Captain Ahab. It's because at every turn, his repentance calls to Jerusalem generated no response at all. In his vocation as prophet, tension existed between the results of his work and the way he was called to do it in Jeremiah 1.

"The word of the LORD came to me, saying, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations."

"Alas, Sovereign LORD," I said, "I do not know how to speak; I am too young"....

...Then the LORD reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, "I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.""

These opening paragraphs of Jeremiah couple God's personal call to Jeremiah with a mandate to speak God's truth to the rebellious people of Judah. God seems to be promising a pretty explosive and incredible ministry, rich with promises of authority and power and influence. Yet for the rest of his recorded career, Jeremiah gets no results. Chapter after chapter of the biblical record captures both Jeremiah's diligence and skill at ministering God's word, and the city of Jerusalem's complete disinterest in hearing it. Jeremiah was very good at what he did. But no one cared, and nothing changed.

This tension bred frustration in Jeremiah, and he was not shy about expressing it. His reputation for 'wailing' comes from his regular outbursts of despondence, often addressed to the Lord. He accused God of seducing him with promises of power and prestige. Jeremiah complained that God abandoned him and reneged on his promise for support. He even expressed regret that he had ever been born, asking "Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?"

That sentiment reminds me of West Virginia. I love West Virginia. West Virginia has a random, but special, place in my heart. I love the vibe of wildness that radiates in heat waves from the mountains. I love that the sky is overcast every time I drive through it, like the state government outlawed sunshine, and the weather complied. I love that my sister and I once ate at a place called 'Biscuit World' along I-64, and that my brother and I once had to sleep in a West Virginia rest stop after vaporizing a deer with our car in Maryland at 2 AM. West Virginia is just great.

West Virginia is also one of the poorest states in America. Its literacy rates hover near the bottom of national rankings. Its per capita income is half that of California's. Most Americans dismiss it as a backwater, little more than a haven for yokels and hillbillies. It has no cachet, no sexiness, no spark to commend it to others. Yet it is also is part of God's creation, a thing that He made and pronounced good. And so sometimes I imagine West Virginia as a person, like Mario Mendoza, or Jeremiah, looking at its beautiful green land that hides so much poverty and hopelessness, and wondering how it can be so good and so bad at the same time. "Didn't you make me?" I can hear West Virginia asking the Lord. "If you did, how come you made me badly?"

Most of us have felt this way at one time or another. This is the question in the body language of the office worker, slumped in his cubicle, swamped by emails and spreadsheets and fax confirmations. It's the question in the pregnancy test, negative again, telling a couple that their desire for a family will go unfulfilled a while longer. It's the question in Mario Mendoza's hands, and in West Virginia's coal fields, and in Jeremiah's ministry. "Did you make a mistake, God? Why am I like this?"

The answer comes, not in any secret formula to achieve success, or in a magic code to ward away failure, but in a reminder. "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart..." These were God's first words to Jeremiah. The foundation of God's call to Jeremiah was Jeremiah's known-ness. Before He said "...I have put my words in your mouth. I have appointed you..." God first told Jeremiah that he was created.

To ask God if he has "made us badly", we first admit that He "made us" at all. This is the blessing that framed all of Jeremiah's complaints and self-doubt, and the one that frames our lives as well.

Centuries earlier, the same promise moved King David to poetry in Psalm 139: "You have searched me, LORD, and you know me....I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made...Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be."

Into the midst of our confusing lives comes the blessing of being fully known to the God of the universe. We may feel like an accident, but we are not. We are an un-enigma, an anti-riddle, the opposite of a mystery. While we fret about if our lives are going right or if we're doing as well as we should, God blesses us with a reminder of how completely on purpose we are. While we try to unravel the mystery of why we suck at hitting baseballs, or being a good American state, or preaching repentance to ancient Semitic people, God speaks- "Before I formed you, I knew you..."

Mario Mendoza has taken his piece of baseball infamy with good humor. Perhaps it's because he knows that's the best way to deflect attention from it, or because he's just a naturally positive person. But hopefully it's because he learned from Jeremiah that his hands aren't worthless because they hit .200- they're worth everything because God made them in the first place.

 CLUTCH

In the world of sports, a debate rages right now about whether there is such a thing as a player being "clutch".

Statisticians love to start these kinds of debates. They pick something which any reasonable person knows exists, such as that people in the South drive worse in the snow, and then dispute that thing's existence.

"This idea of snow eroding a Southerner's driving skills to the point of a demolition derby is an urban legend," they say. "It insults the intelligence of anyone who propagates such a myth, and I would welcome massive sums of grant money to help defend my position." Before long, the statisticians form teams and debate each other. They lob papers and theories at each other for years until the grant money dries up, after which they retire to the Cayman Islands together and laugh about how statistics is the mathematical equivalent of a shell game.

And after the statisticians finish toasting themselves with their graphing calculators, the question of 'does being "clutch" exist?' remains unanswered, which is too bad, because common sense tells us it- "it" being the ability to rise above both external and internal stressors to perform- does. We know this because there is such a thing as neurosurgery.

Nurse: Doctor, I couldn't help but notice how relaxed you seem at this moment. That seems odd considering this procedure has never been attempted before and the patient's life is at stake.

Doctor: That's because I am relaxed. Brain surgery, taking a temperature, it all has to do with the human body. I'm not too worried about it. What I am worried about is getting a granola bar right now. I am famished.

Nurse: Are you sure you shouldn't concentrate a little harder? This is crunch time. His wrist is vibrating pretty rapidly right now.

Doctor: He'll be fine. Listen, statistically speaking, there's no evidence that such a thing as "crunch time" or "being clutch" exists. I'm as good at surgery now as I was during the appendectomy earlier. Now, my scalpel twitched a millimeter during this conversation. Nurse, please make a note that the patient's new favorite color will be 'magenta'.

A practical sports example of a clutch scenario is this: Game 7 of the World Series, bottom of the ninth, two outs, the winning run is on third base. An entire season rides on one player's ability to produce a hit. A "clutch" player will have the presence of mind to call time, exit the batter's box, and then hold out for several million more dollars on his contract. Reggie Jackson once refused to bat in a playoff game for an entire month, thus earning the nickname, 'Mr. October'. That's clutch.

Everyone wants to be clutch. However, we're often unsure if we are or not. If you want to know if you're the kind of person who can come through in the clutch, it's a good idea to ask yourself this question: have I, in the history of my life, ever owned a skateboard with the characters from "Peanuts" on it?

I have. In fact, I nearly died on that Snoopy skateboard, which is not surprising, on account of being young and male at the time. The lone, indisputable fact of parenting is this: all little boys organize their lives around doing things that may kill them. They may look like tow-headed bobblehead dolls, full of the wonder and vitality that we, as adults, long to recapture. But make no mistake- little boys are as cheerfully death-obsessed as a mortician on Prozac.

My childhood friends and I were no different. We were like a tiny goth clique in Osh-Kosh overalls and Sesame Street gear. Our waking mantra was "How can I potentially maim myself today in the name of fun?" And so, long before any math teachers ever schooled us on proportions, we were doing sophisticated calculations about any activity's ratio of "possible bodily harm" to "total awesomeness."

The result of those calculations reads like a 'Goofus and Gallant' cartoon, except if Goofus had ADHD and an adrenaline gland the size of a softball. We set off our neighbor's car alarm trying to steal smoke bombs and other fireworks. We found hills to hurl ourselves down for no good reason, flipping and concussing our brains like the characters from "The Princess Bride". Sometimes, we combined matches and Aqua Net hair spray to make blowtorches.

We also had skateboards, which we used according to the danger trifecta- Going Too Fast, Saying 'Look At Me', and Attempting To Get Air. Of the aforementioned skateboard fiasco, I plowed into the curb of a friend's driveway and went airborne to a height usually reserved for traffic helicopters. When I landed on my back, all the breath whooshed out of my lungs at once, like bellows stoking a fire. For 12 seconds, I couldn't breathe and thought I was going to die. And I wasn't even going to go out in an awesome way. I was going die flat on my back, my lame 'Joe Cool' skateboard beside me, knowing for the first time how it felt to be an accordion. Not clutch.

A clutch situation differs from a normal situation because the stakes are higher. There is more on the line. The best "clutch" athletes come through in pressure situations because they are able to rise above the do-or-die nature of the moment and execute their play without interference from outside stressors, like distraction or self-doubt.

My skateboard bucked me like a rodeo bull because the pressure of the moment overwhelmed my ability. At the very time when I needed my skateboarding skills the most, they fled when confronted with my inexperience and nerves. At the time, I was a decent skateboarder, and fully capable of handling that curb with ease. So why didn't I? Because I wasn't clutch.

The story of Jesus walking on the water is a story about being clutch as well.

"Shortly before dawn Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. "It's a ghost," they said, and cried out in fear.

....

"Lord, if it's you," Peter replied, "tell me to come to you on the water."

"Come," he said.

Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, "Lord, save me!"

Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. "You of little faith," he said, "Why did you doubt?"" (Matthew 14)

Matthew records this story halfway through his Gospel account. By this point, Peter has already witnessed Jesus perform numerous miracles. He has heard much of Jesus' teaching in the Beatitudes. Jesus has even seen fit to commission Peter and the other disciples to go from town to town, proclaiming the Kingdom of God. I don't want to overstate Peter's intellectual abilities, but it's clear from the Gospel narrative that he knows some stuff.

Yet on the water, all of that was for naught. The waves and the tumult of the winds swamped Peter's intellectual understanding of Jesus, and he sank. This was his crunch time moment, and it was too big for him. Peter was not clutch.

There is an attitude among evangelicals that the more we know intellectually about the Bible and Christianity, the healthier our spiritual life is. This is measured in things like the number of Bible verses we can quote, the amount and breadth of Christian books we have read, or our mastery of difficult theological concepts.

Yet for most Christians I know, their primary struggle is not to articulate correct theology, but to act in accordance with those truths when the chips are down. While we may say, "God is sovereign over everything. He is totally in control," the actions of our lives still ask, "God, are you in control? Are you really sovereign" We may say, "God loves the world so much", but with our lives we question, "God, do you actually love me? Am I valuable to you at all?"

We're not hypocrites. We just fail to recognize that there is a difference between talking about what we believe, and actually believing it. That gap is like the difference between batting practice and batting with game the game on the line. It's about being clutch.

I wiped out on my 'Snoopy' skateboard because, as the speed increased, something in my brain said, "You can't handle this." I panicked, the hard drive of my skateboard abilities crashed, and I bit the dust. Peter heard something similar as he stepped from the boat. What he felt in his gut deleted what his brain said it knew about Jesus, and Jesus had to pull him to safety by the hand. On the boat, Peter knew exactly who Jesus was. But out on the water, he wasn't so sure.

Matthew records that, after Peter gets back in the boat, "the disciples worshiped [Jesus], saying 'You really are the Son of God.'" The experience of Peter's water-walking adds new depth to their faith in Jesus. Before this moment, they were saying, "You are," to Jesus, but now they are saying, "You REALLY ARE." It took a clutch moment for the disciples to see the gap between their stated beliefs and their hearts.

The purpose of the Christian life is not to know stuff, but to know Jesus. He does not want to make us good say-ers, or even do-ers, necessarily, but clutch people- people for who there is no separation between our 'mouth theology' and the life we lead when times get intense.

God gracefully multiplies instances in our life where He calls us to "come to [Jesus] on the water." Those times begin with us on the boat, saying "You are..." to the Lord. But they end with us gripping Jesus' hand, soaked, on our knees on the deck, saying "You really are the Son of God."

 SIX PACK

I once bought a book on how to have six-pack abs. I wish I hadn't.

For one, the book is a bright orange color, so there's no hiding it on my bookshelf. I can't wedge it between 'The Brothers Karamazov' and a collection of Flannery O'Connor stories and act like I've never seen it before. This book will not stay un-seen. It's a glowing, spring-loaded eyesore that leaps from the shelf and tackles you with its presence, like an irradiated Great Dane. It's a freshly landed meteorite from the "You Bought WHAT?" galaxy. You can't miss it.

For another, it was also a profound waste of money. As it turns out, having a six pack is virtually impossible. According to the book, here is the foolproof, three step process to carve out a six-pack:

1) Eat a low fat diet, heavy on the fruits, vegetables and protein smoothies.

2) During a workout, target your core with exercises- twists, crunches, rippers- that sound like names for pastries.

3) Be part of the .001% of the population genetically predisposed to have the body fat of a hummingbird.

This is where Operation Six Pack breaks down for me. The only thing I am genetically predisposed to is eating Qdoba burritos from each hand, and the six-pack book never explained how to overcome that. So now I basically own a giant encyclopedia of body image issues.

What I also didn't learn was the exact purpose of having a six-pack. The book's major selling point seemed to be "if you have a six-pack, whenever you want, you can look at your six pack!" I understand this. Everybody wants to look good in the mirror, or at the beach, or when they're DJ'ing at a club as their 'job' on a reality show. A six pack helps with that because it's like a werewolf: it only occurs when the conditions are perfect, and it usually ends up with no shirt on.

But athletically speaking, I don't exactly see the point in toned abs, and the book didn't answer this either. Of course having a strong core can't hurt athletic performance, but I've never heard any athlete point to their six pack as the reason for anything, besides how they can look like an Under Armour mannequin at a sporting goods store.

REPORTER: Lamar, you played an incredible game tonight. What gets the credit for your dominant performance?

PLAYER: It was my six pack, Carl. That's where the magic came from.

REPORTER: Your abs?

PLAYER: The deep waves, absolutely Carl. Specifically the right middle one. He was really working hard tonight. He carried me out there.

REPORTER: I wasn't aware that your abs had any role to play in how well you shot the three.

PLAYER: Oh yeah. Hootie, last night he was telling me, 'Tomorrow night's my night, baby. I'm feeling a triple-double.' And I told him, okay, we'll do some extra side planks just for you. And they really paid off.

REPORTER: Your left middle ab's name is Hootie?

PLAYER: That's right. Daniel-San, Swayze, and Rutherford B. on the right, and then the left side is all Blowfish, up and down.

REPORTER: And did the other abs have any role to play tonight?

PLAYER: Some. Top right and bottom left were helping me on the offensive glass, just with where to get position and stuff. The other three actually didn't play; they endorse Capri-Sun juice drinks and tonight's game was sponsored by Sunkist.

REPORTER: You can force certain abs to function and others not to?

PLAYER: I'm a remarkable man, Carl.

So the book mostly turned out to be a flop. But I did learn one thing from it: what six packs have to do with how we treat shame.

See, nobody pursues chiseled abs because they feel good about their body and are satisfied with the way it looks. No, a six-pack happens because of a desire to perfect our physical appearance. This perfecting instinct grows from the root idea that we're wrong somehow. We're less attractive than we should be, we think, and our current physical condition is something to be insecure about. Magazines and movie stars and infomercials tell us that they can remedy the shame we feel- and so we give ourselves a six-pack.

The shame doesn't have to be only physical, either. When I was a kid I had an "active imagination", which is parent code for "lies constantly". I once told everyone at my church that I was going to visit my friend in St. Louis, even though I didn't know anyone there. I told our next door neighbor that I'd been traded from one team to another in exchange for two other players- in Little League. I once bragged that I had every video game system in existence, but nobody was allowed over to play them because my mom didn't like people messing up the house. What?

I did this because I felt ashamed of who I was. Who knows why- I personally blame the bowl cut and the glasses- but for whatever reason, I decided that I wasn't good enough, or cool enough, and that the only way to make up for that was by inventing someone better. I lied to cover up my shame at being worse than I wanted to be. I tried to give myself a six-pack.

Six-packs are our default method for dealing with shame. Adam and Eve set the template in Eden when they hid from God (Gen 3), and we have been following that playbook ever since. So God provides all the covering we'll need in the sacrificial death of Jesus (Colossians 1:22). Jesus deals with our shame by taking it upon himself. In return, he covers us with his perfect obedience. Jesus gives us his six-pack.

The twist on a six-pack is this: even if I had one, I'd be too ashamed to admit it to anyone. Because if people saw my rock-hard core, they'd know that I'd spent hours in the gym crafting it, read books about how to get it, and just generally wasted my life in pursuit of something shallow. They'd know that I bought into the idea that I can't really feel good about my body without great abs. Suddenly, the six-pack isn't a blessing, but a curse. What once covered my shame now becomes the thing I'm too ashamed to admit I'm covered by.

For us as Christians, sometimes the double bind on our life in Jesus is the same. In Christ's death our forgiveness is secured, our sins covered. The shame in our heart is vaporized by the reality of God's love. We find covering that's more powerful than good works or superstition, and the Gospel ushers us into a life unhindered by insecurity. It really is good news.

But then something happens: shame returns. We hear what the world whispers about Christians- they're intolerant, they're intellectually backwards, they believe ridiculous things about floods and boats and talking snakes. Our imagination takes over. If anyone ever found out that we follow Jesus, they might think less of us. "You're a Christian? Wow, I thought you were normal until I found out about your imaginary friend. You must be really messed up if you need that crutch to make it through life. Gross, you're not going to try to witness to me at all, are you? I don't want to join your little book club."

In these moments, we understand how it felt after Jesus died.

To be Peter at the campfire, humiliated, shaken from prior certainty (Mark 8), now saying, "I told you, woman, I do not know him!" (Luke 22).

To be the chagrined men on the Emmaus road, who "had hoped [Jesus] was the Messiah...." (Luke 24).

To be the disciples, huddled together in terror that the Jews would find them and hurt them (John 20).

Each of them, no doubt, felt foolish that the man they'd believed in was just as powerless and mortal as the next so-called prophet. They were fools and laughingstocks Everyone else had been right all along. And now they had nothing.

But Jesus' resurrection proved that he was not just another six-pack. "Look at my hands. Look at my feet. You can see that it's really me," Jesus says to the apostles. "Touch my body and see that I am not a spirit."

This experience with the risen Christ resolved, for the disciples, the tension of who reigns in this world. Their peers? No. Their culture? No. Their philosophers? No. Who can make them feel ashamed for following this resurrected Jesus? No one. So they "worshiped him and then returned to Jerusalem filled with great joy." (Luke 24:52) And it is the same for us.

God's grace to us in Jesus is that He balances out shame on both sides of the salvation equation. He provides both a lamb who dies and a Lord who lives. No longer does shame dominate our past, or dictate our future. Jesus' blood covers one; His life covers the other.

I can't say that I'll never try to get a six-pack again. I'm an extremely slow learner. But if I ever do, I'll try to remember that Jesus is the one who saves me, and not anything else. The only thing I can feel ashamed over is my orange book.

DECATHLON

Christmas cards are important in my family because we're very competitive.

We're not competitive people in the "Gatorade commercial" kind of way. We're peace-loving people, a Neville Chamberlain family in a Kim Jong Il world. To us, Monopoly games are just an excuse to see who can get away with stealing the most $500 bills. None of us has ever body-slammed the other through a coffee table because of a Guess Who? tournament. And my sister has never thrown down the left bower in Euchre, pounded her chest, and screamed, "We must protect this house!"

But when it comes to Christmas cards, the Pax Larsona goes out the window. That is where our competitive neurons go berserk. For us, the beginning of December is like kickoff at a Kennedy family football game at Hyannisport.

We're not bad people, I promise. But I feel sympathy for the families that send us Christmas cards. They don't know that, when they drop that card in the mail, it is not a gentle expression of goodwill and joy. They are collectively stepping into the Larson Family Octagon, an eight-sided Yuletide face-off of domination. Sending us a Christmas card is like trash-talking Kobe Bryant, or revving your engine next to Jimmie Johnson at a red light. The truth is, when it comes to Christmas cards, we Larsons don't want to share in the bounty of another good year, or be reminded of the reason for the season. Family versus family, we want to have the more awesome Christmas card. We want to beat you. Big time.

And so the Larsons understand that the true purpose of Christmas cards is to convey these twin messages:

1) Our family is still alive, and

2) We had a better year than you.

This is why sending Christmas cards early in December is a rookie mistake. It gives all the other families ammunition. Veteran Christmas card senders wait until as close to Christmas as possible so they can analyze the competition. "The Roberts went to Jamaica this year, but not on a missions trip- we might want to mention something about scaling back during hard financial times for the guilt factor. It also looks like these people's son graduated from college. Jon, mark it to emphasize that you made Dean's List twice. Wow, this girl really got hot this year, let's make an optional note to include that picture of the three of us where we all look like Hollister models. And I know we Photoshopped a picture of Christina fist-bumping Nelson Mandela, but let's wait to use it until we see what the Fischers have."

I love the Olympics, and not just because one year I had a crush on gymnast Dominique Moceanu. No, I love the Olympics because watching them is like getting Christmas cards from sports. In non-Olympic years, our national attention is focused on the big sports: baseball, football, basketball, soccer, maybe even lacrosse if you want to catch a Who's Who of Future Pyramid Schemes. But every two years, the Olympics happen and remind us of all the sports we'd forgotten existed, such as archery, cross country skiing, and deciding which women on the Chinese swim team used to be men. And just like the people who we exchange Christmas cards with, these are sports that you remember liking, but not so much that you actually kept up with them during non-Olympic years. Speed skating? I remember you! Bobsledding, how's it going! Judo? Looking good, my man!

Of all the events, my favorite Olympic sport is the decathlon. Part of the reason is because it's ten events in one. It's like the buffet of the track and field world. Whoever wins it should get a gold medal with a bar code that gives them lifetime free food at CiCi's Pizza and Ponderosa Steakhouse. But the other reason is that whoever wins the decathlon earns, not just a medal, but also the title of "World's Greatest Athlete."

I covet that title for myself, but I'm realizing that I can't win it just for putting enough topspin on a ping pong ball to dig the Suez Canal. Still, the idea of being known as the "World's Greatest Athlete" intrigues me. Decathletes have a cachet that other competitors don't. When Olympians gather (the athletes, not the Greek gods), the decathlete alone can claim to truly do it all. In a roomful of specialists, only the decathlete can claim to be a Renaissance man.

In 1st Corinthians 12, the apostle Paul addresses the issue of personal skills and talents to the Corinthian church. Paul wants to leave no room for confusion on whether, in the church, some members can be so supremely gifted that they are worthy of special veneration and love from the rest of the members. So he rolls out an extended word picture comparing the church to a human body, and says this:

"If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be?... The eye cannot say to the hand, "I don't need you!" And the head cannot say to the feet, "I don't need you!" On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other."

Decathletes achieve success because they are multi-talented. Their overall athletic prowess means that they cannot be pigeonholed into just one event, or compete in a solitary discipline. Ten separate events demand their mastery, which is why the winner of the decathlon at the Olympics can rightly boast the title of "World's Greatest Athlete'". Their breadth of skill sets them apart from their track and field contemporaries. They are the best of the best.

Paul's concern is that the Corinthian church will misunderstand the Christian life to be like an Olympic decathlon. He worries that they will look to those with the flashiest gifts, the most compelling skills, as the "World's Best Christians", and exalt them over the brothers and sisters in Christ that display less compelling gifts.

So Paul's humorous visual- a whole body made up of eyes? Of noses?- illustrates his point that every person that Christ died for contributes something vital to God's kingdom.  Do you really want a whole community of bookworms that write books about the merits of the infralapsarian view? Would your church be better off if every single person in it was a guitar prodigy, with 600 people all onstage playing killer worship riffs and soloing out in a 360 degree rotating cube over the pews? Or do you agree that a Vespers service would look ridiculous if all the people brought their accounting calculators and simultaneously crunched numbers on the church budget?

Paul's concern was warranted. The decathlon urge to exalt the talented and flashy, and minimize the humbly gifted, is deeply ingrained in us. At the family camp my family attended when I was a teenager, one of the attendees was an old, old man named Richard. Richard had severe cerebral palsy. When he spoke it was difficult to understand him. He often had halitosis, and he walked with a side-to-side shuffle, like a penguin. Richard took an interest in me and would often engage me in conversations that I could only half understand. I tolerated these encounters because I thought that's what a good Christian boy should do, but also quickly excused myself from because I wanted to have fun with my friends.

As a spiritual decathlete, he had nothing to offer. He could never have a top 10 most downloaded podcast from iTunes. The local Logan's Run Evangelical Church would never put his picture on their website. And he would never be asked to lead a small group, or teach seminars on how to have the perfect marriage and raise children who will work in the Life Coaching Industry.

Richard was also a genius. His passion was computers, but he was, in fact, something of a polymath in the mold of Leonardo da Vinci. His brilliance was locked behind a mouth that could not always form the words, and a body that disobeyed his mental commands and presented an unflattering appearance. My enduring mental image is of Richard at camp, sitting alone in an Adirondack chair near the bay, baseball cap askew, watching as boats sailed in circles while the rest of us campers passed around him, like a toy car sunken in a creek bed. We had pity on him, true, but not much time for him.

My hope for Richard is that God placed him in a community of worship that took seriously Paul's words that "... the parts (of the body) that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty..." My worry is that Richard instead found a church like the one Paul warned the Corinthians about, filled with decathletes like me, intent on locating "successful" Christians and associating with them, so that we'll look like winners as well.

Paul admonishes the Corinthians not to distract themselves with the gold medalists among us. He reminds them that Christ's sacrifice made each of them equal members of the church (v. 13), and that the purpose of the church is to coexist as God places them together. (v. 27). Building a winning program has nothing to do with it. Vince Lombardi died for no one's sins.

There is an old theater adage that goes, "There are no small parts. Only small actors." So too, can there be no decathletes in God's kingdom. The grace of Jesus humbles us all to the status of "World's Worst Christian", and strips from us the privilege of assigning rank and hierarchy to each other based on outward usefulness. In its place is the unity that comes from knowing that each person, as an image-bearer of God, is placed intentionally among us for His purpose. Probably so we could have more people to send Christmas cards to.

TROPHY

The World Cup may be the most popular sporting event on the planet, a once-every-four-years global soccer extravaganza, but for me it only means this: one lucky country wins a trophy that looks like a gold ball on top of a placenta.

I think this is because the winner always seems to be Brazil. Once upon a time, when lots of countries were winning the World Cup, it probably had a really great trophy, one that every nation coveted and wanted to parade through rural villages and take on diplomatic trips to other countries just to show off. But then Brazil started winning the thing every year, and finally the other countries got fed up and decided that if Brazil was going to get a trophy every 4 years, it would be a radioactive eyesore along the lines of a Jackson Pollock painting.

Trophies were a big deal for me as a kid, mostly because the ones I had all sucked. I blame growing up in the Era of Self-Esteem (motto: "Ecto Cooler for everyone!"), which meant that trophies were plentiful, but never for winning. They were always for something like 'most team spirit', or 'fewest on-field pee pants issues', or 'graduating from D.A.R.E'. Consequently, the trophies in my trophy case were so pitiful I couldn't bear to display them. They were like the toys that come with a Happy Meal- tiny, plastic, and just for participating.

By contrast, my friend Jimmy Tipton was good at everything, and he had the collection of trophies to prove it. There were trophies for baseball, medals for basketball, and ribbons for All-Star team participation. They lined the walls of his room and covered his desk. The whole collection looked stolen from the Count of Monte Cristo.

There wasn't anything Jimmy hadn't won. I guessed that by now people were out there just mailing him trophies for no good reason, or laying them at his feet, like the Wise Men approaching the baby Jesus. "We're not even holding the Tucson Area Public Schools Talent Show and Robotics Competition this year," they would say, "for we have seen your star in the East. Please accept this trophy shaped like the state of Arizona, forged from the purest Solomonic gold." And up on the shelf it would go.

And so whenever we played in Jimmy's room, I imagined him admiring his trophies as he fell asleep, surging with confidence as they beamed out rays of confidence that bathed him in assurance of his own awesomeness. Each one of them was a spray-gold flag planted throughout his short life history, showing at each step where he had walked a path of excellence. No wonder he's a doctor now.

What this reminds me of is something the prophet Samuel did in the Old Testament. In 1st Samuel 7, Samuel challenged the rebellious nation of Israel to lay down their idols and return to following God. Upon hearing that the leaders of Israel were all gathered in one place, the Philistines raised an army and came to attack them:

"While Samuel was sacrificing the burnt offering, the Philistines drew near to engage Israel in battle. But that day the LORD thundered with loud thunder against the Philistines and threw them into such a panic that they were routed before the Israelites. The men of Israel rushed out of Mizpah and pursued the Philistines, slaughtering them along the way to a point below Beth Kar.

Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, "Thus far the LORD has helped us.""

As humans, setting up Ebenezers comes naturally to us. Because we live exclusively in the present moment, the past retreats from our memory until sometimes we can barely remember even the incredible things that have happened to us. This insight is not fresh for the 21st century- Samuel knew this. He knew that Israel had witnessed a great miracle (God throwing the Philistines into confusion), but he also knew that, in time, they would forget it, as they also forgot the Passover, and the manna, and the parting of the Red Sea, and countless other great wonders. So Samuel resolved not to let it pass into foggy recollection- he raised a monument.

Trophies are like little Ebenezers. They are landmarks that we can, during times of forgetfulness, point to and say, "I was there. I did that." And of course they don't have to be actual trophies, with faux-marble bases topped by a plastic figurine shaped like a Stratego piece. They can be anything- accomplishments, spouses, children, jobs, or that 13 point buck head on the wall that scares your daughter into an incoherent mess at bedtime. Whatever they are, they are gifts God gives us to let us to mark places in our lives where God clearly showed up- as the hymn goes, to raise our Ebenezers.

The problem comes when the Ebenezers we raise become about what we've done, instead of what God did. There is no more fleeting substance in the universe than earthly fame, and the whole of history testifies to this. Alexander the Great once conquered the entire known world, and today he is best known to 99% of all people as Colin Farrell in a wig. The Roman historian/fabulist Suetonius wrote biographies of the twelve Caesars of Rome, once the most powerful men on earth, who were revered as gods, and today practically no one could name them, let alone list their accomplishments.

Athletic glory is even less permanent. Just a casual glance at sports history reveals the transience of sporting fame. The great players of one era are eventually superseded by the next- George Mikan becomes Bill Russell becomes Dr. J becomes Magic becomes Jordan becomes LeBron becomes the next one, ad infinitum. Untouchable records fall- Maris' 61 home runs in a season becomes McGwire's 70 becomes Bonds' 73. And championship dynasties give way to others and fade- the Packers become the Raiders become the 49ers become the Cowboys become the Patriots, and so on.**

**- Sic transit gloria, Tom Brady. You were warned.

This backs up what the Bible says: "...yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes." (James 4:14) "You have made my life no longer than the width of my hand. My entire lifetime is just a moment to you; at best, each of us is but a breath." (Psalm 39:5) "Man is like a breath; his days are like a fleeting shadow." (Psalm 144:4)

The fact is that Ebenezers raised to our own glory are flimsy landmarks, crippled by the fact of our mortality. They are tethered by spider silk to our papier mache lives, and as we die they erode almost instantly. But those Ebenezers raised to the Lord are different. Because God's goodness is as infinite as we are finite, those monuments are steel cables, attaching the earth to heaven like rigging from a harbor dock to a barge.

I read once where thieves stole most of the trophies that tennis legend Pete Sampras won over the course of his record-setting career. Setting aside the question of how, exactly, one fences a trophy reading "1995 Wimbledon Champion", or who would even want to buy it, the most interesting thing in the story was something Sampras said after the theft. He talked about wanting to show his kids all the championship trophies he'd won in his career. "Losing this stuff," he said, "is like having the history of my tennis life taken away."

It's sad that Pete Sampras' trophies were stolen. But there is a sense in which he experienced literally what happens to all people figuratively. All the trophies we acquire in life are eventually stolen, in some way. And because they are about our own fleeting glory, they are powerless to do what we want: to mark our path in a permanent way, and give us assurance that our lives were not lived in vain.

Even today my trophy collection is lame. But God's grace to me, like it is to all of us, is to bypass the ridiculous trinkets of a jealous childhood and instead provide us with what we really wanted all along: real trophies, the life experiences through which God reminds us that the trail of all life goes through His country, and moments that we can carry with us as constant reminders of His awesomeness. Not mine- or Jimmy Tipton's.

 SHOES

In first grade I thought boys' and girls' shoes were the same and got busted wearing my sister's Ronald McDonald high tops on the bus.

In retrospect this was not a super surprising development. It's not that I'd had a history of trouble recognizing gender specific clothing. But on my backpack there were places where you could write things about yourself, and for 'Favorite Band', I wrote 'Denver, the Last Dinosaur'. So it makes sense that wearing shoes with the Hamburglar and Grimace on them wouldn't trip my "Is this socially acceptable?" alarm in the least.

I mention this only so you'll believe me when I tell you that I have never owned a cool pair of shoes. Not once in my life. When I was a toddler my feet were too wide, so it was Stride Rite for my first pairs. While I was coveting the British Knights I saw on 'Double Dare', I was wearing all-white Tretorns. When I wanted the L.A. Gear's that lit up when you walked, I had plain black cross trainers. In high school I wore a pair of Airwalks a year after they stopped being cool, and even though I didn't skate. Right now my main pair of shoes is some Sambas, which were last cool when I was 12. I'll never win.

Every part of life's shoe adventure has disappointed me, even shoe stores. Growing up, I thought that there was no way the Shoe Carnival DJ made less than six figures. He's the Shoe Carnival DJ! He wears a headset microphone, spins cool music and gives away prizes. If there was ever a nuclear holocaust, the Shoe Carnival DJ would be one of the people the government uses to repopulate the earth- or so I thought. I was shocked when I discovered that the Shoe Carnival DJ doesn't drive a Bentley. As it turns out, if 'Shoe Carnival DJ' is your only job, your parents tell everyone you're on welfare.

It's a big deal that I couldn't get the shoe thing right. There isn't a much more important relationship in life than the one shared between a young boy and his shoes. I don't say this to slam on fathers, or best friends, or those children that grew up with pets so beloved that they made Lassie look like Cujo. What I am saying is that the bond between boy and shoe is one of the deepest of his life. If the family dog is floating in a lake alongside a boy's prized pair of sneakers, and that boy can only save one of them, he will bank on the possibility that the dog can swim and go for the shoes.

This is, I think, because God made man from the dust. Boys are Antaean in nature; like Hercules' mythological foe, they draw their strength and confidence from contact with the Earth, and their shoes are the primary conduit for it. The more awesome the shoe, the greater the energy that flows up towards the boy. The lamer the shoe, the less reliable that child is for kickball. Or so little boys believe.

My friend Ben's son, Preston, is a perfect example of this. Ben tells the story of the time when he and Preston were in a sporting goods store together, and Preston's shoe radar went off. As a seven year old, Preston still believed everything in shoe marketing was one hundred percent true. Ignoring rack after rack of sensibly priced footwear, Preston leveled his crosshairs on an $85 pair, which, as Ben noted later "is totally ridiculous for children's shoes." That fact eluded Preston, however. He looked Ben in the eyes, solemn with purpose, and said this:

"Dad, I need these shoes. These are Nikes. They make you run faster, jump higher, and punch harder. I have to have them."

I've been down that road before. In the early 1990′s Reebok released a basketball shoe called the Pump, which was a high-top shoe with an inflatable air bladder around the foot and a pump in the tongue. Further proving that the most brilliant people alive design marketing campaigns for sneakers**, Reebok convinced people that a shoe built using the same blueprints as the Titanic could somehow help you run faster and jump higher. This was in stark contrast to reality, in which playing basketball in Pumps was like strapping two aquariums to your feet. Needless to say, I lobbied my parents for these shoes like a politician. And got them. And regretted it. Thank you, Reebok.

**- This is sad.

My point is, shoes are important to guys. And I think Ben's son Preston was on to something when he tried to convince Ben to get him the Nikes. He was on to the same thing that convinced me to buy Pumps: I thought that they would instantly make me better at everything. I thought they were an athletic silver bullet, that they would provide an immediate boost in my peak performance like the advertising suggested. If that was possible, it was worth any price.

As Christians, we're spiritually impatient people. We don't want to be like Jesus later. We don't want to be more spiritually mature tomorrow. We don't want to wait on Christian growth. We want it to happen TODAY. Like, now. And if we're not improving as quickly as we think we should, we're going to make it happen. We'll buy any book, do any Bible study, try any worship fad, or go to any hip new church in search of that silver bullet that's going to get us there.

Suddenly, Preston sounds pretty wise. We've allowed Reebok to direct our spiritual lives. We want new shoes.

One of my favorite word pictures for the relationship between God and people is that of pottery. The Bible is rich with this imagery. Isaiah 64:8 says "...yet you, Lord, are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand." In Jeremiah 18, the prophet Jeremiah is told by God to go to the potter's house, where God shows him a potter working a piece of clay upon the wheel- the same metaphor. In Romans 9, the apostle Paul chastises those who would take issue with God's direction for their lives, asking "Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use?"

I like the image of God as a potter because it subverts our instincts about the sanctification process. The potter has just two shaping mechanisms at his disposal as he molds the clay: his hand, and the wheel the clay spins on. The hand is God's touch, the one He promised when Paul said, "He who began a good work in you is faithful to complete it." Guess what the wheel is?

Time.

You can't microwave pottery. It's not like one of those capsules you drop in hot water and it becomes a foam dinosaur. Pottery takes time. And we take time too. God sanctifies us by putting His hand on our hearts, and letting the wheel do the work. Time washes over us, spinning our clay lives through the fingers of the Lord, which gradually mold us into the shapes He wants. This is what the Bible means when it talks about 'sanctification'.

But shoe-shopping is deeply ingrained in our spiritual mindset. We think change should happen quickly. The Bible tells us that it happens slowly. Peter didn't lie when he said that a day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day. Paul wasn't just musing when he asked, "Who can know the mind of God? Who has become his counselor?" Translation: God does what He wants, and on his time.

There is no speeding up the shaping process. The wheel moves at its own steady pace, and God's touch never leaves our lives throughout it. Because of this, we can have confidence that where we are at spiritually at any point in our lives is still a part of God's process. We can stop our quest for those new spiritual shoes- programs, books, small groups, whatever- which will make us better Christians, as if God loved us more as we began to struggle less. Yield instead to the motion of the pottery wheel, settle down, and let God do the making.

The only other pair of cool shoes I've owned in my life were a pair of Converse Reacts, the ones Larry Johnson endorsed in his 'Grandmama' ad campaign. I loved those shoes, and at the time I thought they made all the difference in the world to my basketball game. They were even a little bit holy- I wrote 'Jesus' on the left one, and 'Christ' on the other, in emulation of a Louisville player I grew up watching.

But truthfully, the shoes I wore didn't make a difference. I played the same in Reacts as I did in any other shoe. My crossover did not become more deadly, nor my rebounding more tenacious. And the truth of my spiritual life is the same: I'm still the same follower of Jesus, regardless of whichever spiritual get-rich-quick scheme I've bought into at the time. Meanwhile, God's process, though slow and trying to my patience, works 100% of the time. I don't need new shoes at all.

 ALL IN

I'm not a good poker player.

This is not my fault, necessarily. Much of the blame falls to genetics: I was tragically born with no math skills. I'm the only person I know who's currently receiving abacus catalogs. When I calculate the tip at a restaurant, I usually throw anything I can remember from my math career at it ("....carry the one....as the limit approaches x....then find the slope...and take the absolute value to convert to radians..."), then scribble down a random number and walk out, sweaty and disheveled like a mom whose kids have discovered her collection of Mardi Gras beads. This mathematical disability prevents me from executing complex gambling maneuvers such as counting cards or tabulating odds, as well as less sophisticated endeavors like finding my car in the parking lot

My other hindrance as a poker player is my inability to read tells. A 'tell' is when a player gives away the strength of their hand through an unknowing physical gesture or movement, such as an eye roll or a cough. Good poker players can spot even the subtlest of tells and use them to their advantage. I, on the other hand, read body language with the ease of the Cyrillic alphabet.

My usual hand of poker involves scrutinizing a player's potential tell (such as placing the cards in the middle of the table, saying 'I'm out', and asking if anyone else needs more nachos), then evaluating whether that is a "bluff". This process continues until I decide to bet heavily, a move known as "raising", at which point the other players remind me that that particular hand ended several hours ago, since then they have been betting on my behalf, and I am now out of money.

Still, I enjoy gambling. I'm especially fascinated with the concept of the riverboat casino. Although unpopular in states with limited water access, the riverboat casino is very popular in other states where logical thought has not yet been popularized. How is putting the gambling establishment on the water any different than building it on land? Do people think that the liquid acts as a moat to prevent sin from getting to the mainland? Maybe a state senator somewhere has scientific research showing that compulsive gamblers are afraid of the water. If that's true, then no wonder they built Las Vegas in a desert.

I occasionally play poker with my co-workers or friends. I am always welcome in these games, and my friends love to invite me, because my presence means free money. Me settling down at the poker table is the equivalent of watching a fresh bag of dollar bills walk into your home and immediately distribute itself to everyone until there is nothing left and a little moth flies out of the bag. Those of you with teenage daughters will understand the feeling.

Those of you with teenage daughters will also understand that one advantage of poker is that the men playing it professionally are not what you would call "heartthrobs", or even "allowed to buy just one seat on a airplane." Most other sports are played by highly skilled athletes, and as part of that job those athletes spend hours in weight rooms working on muscle groups even Renaissance sculptors were unaware of. By contrast, the most powerful muscles on a poker player tend to be the ones associated with buying hoodies and sunglasses. The result is that, as a group, poker players have the raw physical charisma of a beanbag chair, and similar body shapes. So the odds that a professional poker player will end up shirtless on a poster in your daughter's room are extremely small.

All that to say, pro poker players and I don't have much in common. But there is one experience that I, and most other home players share with the pros: pushing a big stack of chips to center table and going 'all in'.

One of the easiest words to define in the Bible is 'faith'. We may thrash about attempting definitions of thornier words like 'sin' and 'free will'. But if the question is 'What is faith?', a person need not stagger off to the theological library, resigned to yet another night of angst amid dusty tomes of God-speak. They need only to turn to the book of Hebrews for the answer, in one of the most famous verses in the Bible.

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1)

Jim Elliot understood this assurance. He took it and ran with it all the way to the jungles of South America, where he evangelized the Auca Indians and was eventually martyred in the effort. His most famous quote, no small part of his legend as one of 20th century Christianity's most dynamic missionaries, echoes this conviction: "He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."

Most Christians probably wish their faith experiences were of the 'He is no fool' variety. I can't name a single Christian that yearns for a faith of a more milquetoast, shrinking-violet type. We want to be stronger, not weaker. Yet for many believers, our experience falls somewhere short of Jim Elliot's boldness. And most of us, if asked, could quote Hebrews 11 by heart. Jim Elliot was a man who, on the surface, knew what it meant to bet everything he had on God. He knew how to go all-in, and it sounds so simple to get there. What are we missing?

We're missing the full meaning of going all-in. Hebrews 11 is only half of the story on faith. The other half is found in 2 Corinthians 4, Paul's letter to a church in Greece.

"We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body.

So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you. It is written: "I believed; therefore I have spoken." Since we have that same spirit of faith, we also believe and therefore speak, because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you to himself."

In this section of his letter, Paul explains to the Corinthian church the different ways that he and his fellow missionaries have suffered for the sake of the Gospel. Notice the contrast in each explanation: "hard pressed/not crushed....perplexed/not in despair....persecuted/not abandoned, etc." The promise of resilience is paired with a stated hardship. The static definition of faith, as provided by Hebrews, is here in 2nd Corinthians given a real-life context. There is no such thing as simple belief, Paul seems to be saying. It always comes in response to something. Faith never happens in a vacuum.

The realities of poker bear out this fullness. In a professional poker game, players typically go all-in after their starting hand has been strengthened by subsequent cards. They have 'read' their opponent's tells, analyzed their betting patterns, and calculated the likelihood that the other player has the better hand. Their all-in call is the result of advanced reasoning patterns sometimes associated with chess-playing computers. By contrast, in the home games I've played in, most all-in calls are the result of either extreme luck ("I thought I had a six, but it's really a nine! All in!") or the realization that if that player does not get home in the next ten minutes, their wives, via the miracle of the judicial system, will take half their stuff.

But in either case, the players have no idea what the other guy has in his hand. The outcome is uncertain. They have wagered everything against something unknown. They have gone all-in. And they could lose.

This possibility of loss is the source of the 'all-in' tension in our faith. It is the place where the hypothetical hope of Hebrews meets the reality of a 2nd Corinthians world. The British philosopher G.K. Chesterton understood this tension:

"Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and, eclipse....For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful."

We believe in a known God while we live in an unknown world. And so faith is the act of going all-in with God when we have no idea what the odds are and we have no clue about the possible outcome. We rest our elbows on the felt table of our lives and push all our chips to the middle. Our wager is on God, repeatedly, in hopeless circumstances, and the essence of faith is of doing this over and over again, second after second, in all our moments going all-in with every hand.

The "He is no fool" faith of Jim Elliot's quote and Hebrews 11 eludes us because it simplifies what the life of faith is. We are in a battle, not to intellectually understand the clear teaching of the Bible, but to see it in the midst of life circumstances like the ones Paul describes. And so we cling to an "all in" faith- one which asks us to practice Godly betting patterns: play our cards of Hebrews 11 hope in the face of 2nd Corinthians odds.

I have a musician acquaintance who sings these words: "...hope hears the music of the future before it's played; faith is the courage to dance to it today". I hope it's okay with him that sometimes, when I hear them, I think about gambling.

 KAYFABE

Mothers of the world, I apologize to you on behalf of your sons. Some of us like professional wrestling.

Not me, of course- not really, anyway. Most of my experience with wrestling comes from wondering at what age a child first seriously considers a pro wrestling career. Where does that begin? There must be a moment, age 6 or 7, where they look at themselves wearing only Optimus Prime underwear and galoshes, and think to themselves "You know, if I could only wear this to work every day, I'd be happy."

I will also say this to you moms: you are not officially qualified as a parent until you've walked in on your son pretend-wrestling a pillow while his friend shrieks play-by-play like an abandoned hiker. This is the true rite of passage into parenthood. There you are, a reasonable, suburban mother, standing in the doorway as your son- the one you're trying to raise into a sensitive male with balanced emotions and turtlenecks and an appreciation for aromatherapy- wraps a couch cushion in a figure four leg lock and demands that it tap out or be castrated. On that day, your tears will be real, and they will cost $7,000 in billable therapy hours to sort out.

Speaking of therapy, cutting-edge historical research has revealed that Sigmund Freud gained his initial fame, not for his psychoanalytic work, but for his notorious theory that a male child's most damaging trauma is the discovery that professional wrestling is all fake. Freud's protégé Carl Jung disputed this point. Jung asserted that male children are most traumatized when their parents do not buy them highly advanced video game systems for Christmas. The disagreement escalated as they exchanged verbal jabs, with Jung calling Freud a "cigar-chomping waffle brain", while Freud retaliated by calling Jung "Swiss."

The two agreed to resolve their differences in a controversial steel cage ladder match, one which the prime minister of Switzerland famously opposed, saying "nobody will ever believe this actually happened." Early momentum in the match favored Jung as he twice staggered Freud with his signature move, a drop-kick nicknamed "the Jungian Archetype". Freud swung the match back in his favor by asserting his aerial dominance from the turnbuckles, and finally won it by putting Jung into his patented "Collective Unconscious" headlock until Jung passed out.

Only later was it discovered that Freud and Jung had fabricated their entire feud. They scripted their verbal sparring, choreographed their match's outcome, and even helped each other design their colorful, tasseled costumes. For this, these two men have since been credited with the invention, not just of modern psychology, but of professional wrestling's most important element: kayfabe.

Kayfabe is a word which refers to the portrayal of events within the fictional wrestling universe as actual reality. In pro wrestling, it helps to think of the ring as a stage, the actions as a storyline, and the wrestlers as brawnier versions of Kenneth Branagh.

For example, if, in the context of a RawNitro Overdrive wrestling event, Wrestler 1 taunts Wrestler 2 about stealing the affections of Wrestler 2′s lady friend, and Wrestler 2 responds by telling Wrestler 1 that he has just detonated a car bomb at Wrestler 1′s house, we know that this is just a story being acted out. It's not real, it is kayfabe. How do we know this?

1) We know that in real life Wrestler 1 has not stolen Wrestler 2′s girlfriend; in fact, Wrestler 1 is happily married going on 17 years. He has written books on how to build a strong, healthy marriage and hosted several marital seminars, leading to rumors that Wrestler 1, while capable of tearing several phone books into pieces the size of gerbil shavings, is about as manly as Dr. Oz.

2) We know that Wrestler 2′s reproductive drive has been all but amputated by years of perpetual steroid abuse, and Wrestler 1′s wife holds very little interest to him. Wrestler 2 would just as soon be interested in stealing a Happy Meal.

3) We also know that in reality Wrestler 2, as a result of numerous flying elbow drops to the face throughout his career, can now only perform technical tasks on the level of building a paper airplane. A car bomb is beyond his reach.

Kayfabe is just one of many words unique to the wrestling lexicon. The vocabulary of a smart wrestling fan contains phrases like 'angle', 'worked shoot", 'legit heat' and 'jobber'. Mastery of this vocabulary reveals those whose understanding of wrestling is sophisticated, as opposed to those who are ignorant. Witness the difference below- same thoughts, different vocabulary.

Regular Person\- That interview is talking about something real. Back when Wrestler X was less successful, he changed from 'good guy' to 'bad guy' in his story line. During his match with Wrestler Z, who has actual fighting skills, a move went wrong and Wrestler Z got hurt. As a result, when Wrestler X won the match, Wrestler Z stopped pretending and actually punched him in the groin.

Smart Fan\- That worked shoot referenced some legit heat. It goes back to when Wrestler X was a jobber turning from face to heel in an angle. During his match with Wrestler Z, who is a hooker, there was a botch on a move and Wrestler Z went down. As a result Wrestler X got over and Wrestler Z broke kayfabe to give him a low blow after the bell.

Vocabulary matters. The words that we say mean things, and the words that we choose can either exclude or include people in the conversations we have. The two paragraphs above are a great example. In the first paragraph, the message being communicated is clear. The words are plain English, and they come from a pool of vocabulary that is largely universal in its shared meanings. An outsider may not be interested in what is being said about wrestling, but they could at least understand the intent of the thought process.

By contrast, the second paragraph is basically Klingon. It's loaded with the specialized jargon of the wrestling subculture. It's insider-y to the degree that someone with no understanding of those words could never understand it, and by virtue of that, it excludes people. It says, 'This conversation is for wrestling insiders only. You are welcome to join, but only on our terms. You must learn our language to participate. We will not deign to speak with you in ways that you understand. Learn our words instead. Say kayfabe.'

Christians should be all too familiar with this issue. Christians have our own kayfabe language: 'Christianese', a linguistic set that has less in common with English and more in common with the jargon preferred by wrestling fans. We have our favorite buzzwords, such as "missional", "spiritual gift", "outreach", "quiet time" and "fellowship", words which, to those on the inside, make perfect sense, but to those on the outside sound like baby talk.

On the one hand, it's understandable why exclusionary word choices like Christian-ese are useful. They immediately single out those who masquerade as part of a group without actually belonging to it. In fact, there's even Biblical precedent for it- it's a shibboleth.

In the book of Judges, the Ephraimite tribesmen were attacked by men of Gilead.

"Gilead then cut Ephraim off from the fords of the Jordan, and whenever Ephraimite fugitives said, 'Let me cross,' the men of Gilead would ask, 'Are you an Ephraimite?' If he said, 'No,' they then said, 'Very well, say "Shibboleth" (שיבולת).' If anyone said, "Sibboleth" (סיבולת), because he could not pronounce it, then they would seize him and kill him by the fords of the Jordan."

Those that can't say kayfabe are immediately recognized as people who are new to wrestling, or are simply pretending to like wrestling. Likewise, those who can't speak Christian-ese reveal themselves to be either new or pretending to Christianity. Language fluency helps us quickly draw in-or-out judgments about people, judgments which help us protect the integrity of the group, be it our churches or Bible studies. And so mastery of Christian-ese is an outward sign of membership. Are you a believer in Christ? Prove it. Say shibboleth.

But Christian-ese becomes a problem when we allow it to become a barrier between Christ and the world. When we soak ourselves in church language, we sometimes forget how to speak the language of the world around us as well. Our skill at Christian-ese robs us of the ability to reasonably tell others the Gospel. "Jesus is the Lamb of God, the propitiation for our sins and the Second Adam," we might explain to a non-believer who wants to better understand the person of Jesus. That sentence contains perfectly Biblical language which, to the un-churched, also sounds like total baby talk.

God calls us out of the world so that we might then also go back into it. This double-life carries with it the implication that we will also be bilingual, capable of speaking the spiritual tongues of both church and the world. Too often, as we gain the ability to say shibboleth to Christians, we lose the ability to say shibboleth back to non-believers. We lose fluency with word choices that prove to them that we are not merely members of the Evangelical Borg Collective, but real human beings with a real Savior that genuinely cares about all people.

Tell us you care about us, the world asks, and then we might listen. Better yet, show us. Abandon your shibboleth words that demand that we come to church on your terms, and instead tell us about Jesus in our native tongue. Say our shibboleth. Say kayfabe.

 STADIUM

"I don't know the scalping laws here. I don't want to go to Italian jail on the 3rd day of vacation."

If that quote sounds like a gigantic cop-out on something totally awesome, you'd be right. That's me in Milan, Italy, standing outside the San Siro stadium with my brother, turning down a chance to see a U2 concert we stumbled upon because I'm afwaid of the scwalping waws in Euwope. In the Museum of Missed Opportunities, this one has its own exhibit, right next to "Pardon Me, Hot Girl All Alone On the Train, Would You Like To See My Pokemon Cards?"

I admit it: I blew it with U2. I have no excuse. If that moment were an ocean mammal, instead of lassoing it like a dolphin and riding it through an aquatic paradise for the thrill of a lifetime, I let it beach itself, like a disoriented whale, on the hot sand of my indecisiveness. I should have been hauled before a grand jury of thrill-seekers and commanded to explain my general timidity.**

Travis Pastrana: Andrew Larson, on behalf of our corporate sponsors Mountain Dew and Electrolux, you've been called here to explain your actions on July 6th, 2009.

Sir Edmund Hillary: In our file it says that you had a chance, while backpacking through Europe, to potentially attend a U2 concert, and that you spurned this chance due to some un-nameable fear. This troubles me highly, and that's not a pun about how I was the first person to summit Mt. Everest.

Me: It wasn't due to some un-nameable fear. That's not true.

Darice Bannock: We beg to differ, mon.

Me: Darice? From 'Cool Runnings'?

Pastrana: He may be a fictional character, but he also became an Olympic bobsledder in a country that has more bananas than snowflakes. He knows about taking risks.

Darice: Too true, my brother. Our mind-viewing technology shows that right here, at the moment of decision, you were gripped by the irrational fear that you might accidentally buy tickets from an undercover Interpol agent. What?

Me: Not true! My brother's leg hurt! We were trying to get back to the train station.

Sir Edmund Hillary: We also have videotape of you half-heartedly walking back and forth in front of the stadium, pretending to make up your mind when, in our transcript of your thoughts at that exact moment, you were wondering how to say "Excuse me, have you ever seen 'TaleSpin'?" in Italian.

Pastrana: I've jumped out of an airplane without a parachute before, no problem. But THAT just blew my mind.

Me: I don't know the laws in Italy. It was our third day, I didn't want to ruin the trip. I was being wise.

Hillary: Very disappointing.

Darice: There's actually some other stuff here if you go back farther... I'm going to bring it up on the big screen.

Me: Hey, quit messing with that.

Darice: Looks like you buying several Goo Goo Dolls CD's...

Me: I'll just be leaving now.

Darice: ...and watching 'Gilmore Girls'...??

Pastrana: This one looks interesting. Are you crying?

Darice: The monitor says that this is while he's watching the end of 'The Guardian'.

Me: It's a good movie!

Hillary: The one where Kevin Costner swims?

Me: He died TO SAVE ASHTON KUTCHER'S LIFE!!

Pastrana: Wow. That moment was definitely not brought to you by Mountain Dew.

Darice: Please hand over your man card.

Me: I hate you guys.

**I realized after I wrote this that this that this section bears a more than passing resemblance to the Albert Brooks movie 'Defending Your Life'. It further proves one of Solomon's aphorisms from Ecclesiastes: "There is nothing new under the sun, because Albert Brooks wrote it all."

So adventure and I have an uneasy relationship. I love adventures, just as long as I've planned them, and they're expected, and they don't happen anyplace that's way outside my comfort zone. My life motto is, 'carpe diem, unless I wasn't given 2 weeks to prepare for it, or my contact lenses feel dry that day.'

That unease is amplified by the pressure I put on myself to live the adventure rhetoric that sometimes bubbles up from mainstream Christianity. This takes the form of books with titles like "Jesus: The Great Adventure", "God's Electrifying Journey for You", or sermons with enough excitement hype that Jesus sounds like the new roller-coaster at Kings Island. These messages usually have the very inspirational effect of making me feel like a total loser. How am I supposed to say 'yes' to something as big as God's best life now if I'm saying no to The Edge in Milan? I must really be hopeless.

In the book of Acts, Luke records the story of the apostle Philip teaching the Ethiopian eunuch about Jesus on the road to Gaza. Luke's opening lines of the story are these:

"As for Philip, an angel of the Lord said to him, "Go south down the desert road that runs from Jerusalem to Gaza." So he started out, and he met the treasurer of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great authority under the Kandake, the queen of Ethiopia."

The jewel in this passage is "So he started out, and he met..." As veteran Bible readers, we make the mistake of assuming, because we know that Philip is going to evangelize the Ethiopian, that Philip knows he'll evangelize the Ethiopian. But this isn't necessarily true. In the Acts narrative, God moves missionaries around like Peyton Manning running the no-huddle.  Paul, you get over here by Macedonia. Barnabas, go in motion to the left. No, over here, by John Mark. Philip, split out wide on the road to Gaza. Great Commission on two, on two. Set!

In this story, Philip likely has no clue what will happen once he sets out for Gaza. Nothing in the text suggests that God lets him in on some mind-blowing plan He has for Philip's journey. Will it be exciting or boring? Will he gain worldly fame or toil in anonymity? Philip didn't know. He only knew that he was supposed to get on the road and go. So he started out.

Likewise, Jesus promises his followers nothing about the journey, and certainly nothing of an exciting life. He promises us no headlines, no acclaim, no non-stop, adrenaline-soaked action. What he promises us is the 'so-he-started-out' life modeled by Philip. It is a life along our own Gaza roads, the ones God has called us each to individually, hand in hand with Him, with no promises about what happens along on the way. We know only that He is the one who sent us, who goes with us, and who will be there at the end.

"So he started out..." is the set-up. The payoff is in the second part, "... and he met..." God's plan for Philip's journey included an encounter with a God-seeker. Consequently, Philip experienced a unique opportunity to participate in the building of God's Kingdom. His willingness to start out gave God the forward motion to let Philip meet the Ethiopian eunuch. For us, it's the same. The 'so-he-started-out' life leads to the 'and-he-met' moments that God provides for us along the way. The accumulation of these moments, over the course of our lives, constitutes the truly adventurous Christian life.

This "so he started out, and he met" dynamic is at the core of our Christian adventure. God graciously calls us to the road and asks us to start out. Caring nothing for the stereotypical definitions of adventure provided by pop culture or mainstream Christianity, he instead supplies us with his own: unlimited and-he-met chances. Each pilgrim's progress, like Bunyan's Christian on the path to the Celestial City, touches some part of this world, and through each touch God graciously accomplishes His ultimate purposes. Philip understood this. So he started out. And he met.

Regardless, I still rue missing the U2 concert. I asked my brother about it when we returned home and he just rolled his eyes, said "Yeah, man...." and trailed off in reverie. It's too bad, too. I checked and it looks like scalping is legal in Italy. I wouldn't have gone to jail at all.

SWEAR CAM

I own the 1991 Fiesta Bowl on DVD.

When I tell people this they typically give me a blank, slightly confused look, like I just told them I own videotape of a cyst removal. But the '91 Fiesta Bowl holds special meaning for me, it being the first major bowl game that the University of Louisville ever won in my lifetime. Without this DVD, I wouldn't have access to some truly great moments in sports history, such as Gene Stallings wearing a plaid blazer that was factory rejected for being "too visually disturbing" or Howard Schnellenberger setting an NCAA record for most pipe tobacco smoked during an opening coin toss.

I also wouldn't have access to a time when a quarterback anywhere in college football could have a sub .500 completion percentage with a 3:1 interception to touchdown ratio, as Alabama's Gary Hollingsworth did that season. Times were gentler in the early-Nineties, before 7-on-7 passing camps, personal quarterback tutors, and various other programs in the nefarious, multi-billion dollar Quarterback Coaching Industry**. Nowadays, those statistics would be unacceptable. Were an Alabama quarterback to throw several interceptions in a game today, the Crimson Tide fans, ever supportive and rational, would encourage him to "bounce back" in the next contest by bulldozing his family's house. Roll Tide!

** --This industry is America's third largest growth sector. The U.S. Department of Commerce estimates that by 2015, 42% of all working males will be personal quarterback coaches. The rest will be agents.

But the thing I like most about the 1991 Fiesta Bowl is the quality of the television production. This game, compared to the quality of TV football I enjoy today, looks like it was produced by some of the patients from "Awakenings" It's a true generational marker. Baby Boomers can remind their kids of a time when there was no Wi-Fi, or Starbucks, or vitamin-fortified water with ginseng. I likewise relish the future chance to show my children this football game and say: "Look kids! Once upon a time, TV sports had only a few cameras and cheesy graphics! And we sometimes had to wait several plays to see an instant replay! And none of the players, during their introductions, said that they played for "The" Ohio State University, or "The U", wherever that is! And John Madden and Brett Favre were not yet married!!" It would blow their mind, this knowledge.

But what would really blow their mind would be the lack of a Swear Cam. We, as seasoned TV sports viewers, take the Swear Cam for granted, but there once was a time without it, just as there once was a time without cars with sensors on their bumpers that beeped when you were about to back into something. This time, of course, was the late Cretaceous Era, and the lack of bumper-beeping technology was a major determining factor in the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The Swear Cam is what occurs when a player makes a truly boneheaded mistake, or an official blows a call, and someone in the production truck says to themselves, "Wouldn't it be great TV if we cut to the coach for a reaction shot featuring a slow-motion replay of the coach enunciating an F-bomb like a spelling bee contestant?"

The answer to that question, of course, is: no, it would not, because all coaches not named 'John Wooden' or 'Tony Dungy' curse like longshoremen. And so now you, as responsible parents, in addition to explaining to your children both the difference between Budweiser and Coors AND how the prostate works, must now also tell outrageous lies to them ("No, sweetie, he said 'flying truck'.") and figure out where their lip-reading ability suddenly came from. Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation never had to deal with that.

Football coaches trying to maintain a wholesome image had better luck back back in the 60′s and 70′s, before the proliferation of sideline cameras. This is not to say that they were at all different from today's coaches. The founder of the NFL and the Chicago Bears, 'Papa Bear' George Halas, was so skilled in the art of profanity that he could swear into a tub of ice water and turn it into Guinness on tap. In his own words, he knew it was time to leave football when he could "no longer chase down the refs to cuss at them." And I don't even want to think of the ruin that would befall the Vince Lombardi Leadership Industry** if tape ever surfaced of Coach Lombardi repeatedly asking an official, in graphic terms, if he had ever been to the zoo.

**- Leadership is America's 4th largest industry. The federal government estimates that by 2020, 74% of all ex-high school and collegiate quarterbacks will be Leadership Coaches. The rest will be involved in pyramid schemes.

The point is that the Swear Cam has given us a new perspective on head coaches** , one which shows that in spite of their numerous books on Success (TM) and exorbitant public speaking fees, they are still normal people, inasmuch as they exhibit the vocabulary choice of sixth graders. They are also just like us, in the sense that they are often two people.

**- The National Council on Language estimates that head coaches account for 83% of all profanity use worldwide.

Before the Swear Cam Era began, coaches safely assumed that they could say anything they wanted on the sidelines and their public persona would remain pristine. George Halas could use any kind of soul-blasting profanity he chose, and his larger reputation as a benevolent old man could stay intact, because his sideline behavior stayed localized. There was no Swear Cam to take that duality to the masses. There was Sideline Coach and Out-In-The-Community Coach. The two rarely met, and the world saw only one or the other.

I can understand this multiple identity thing. Once upon a time, I was two different people as well. Church Andrew read multiple C.S. Lewis books before his twelfth birthday and attended every level of Christian schooling possible, including Presbyterian kindergarten. But Everywhere Else Andrew loved swearing and saying funny things, no matter how coarse or derogative, and mostly would do and say anything to fit in. The two of them never met, but they'd heard of each other, and that was enough. Church Andrew hated Everywhere Else Andrew for not being a better person and constantly making him fail at being a good person. Everywhere Else Andrew hated Church Andrew for making him feel guilty all the time. The only thing they agreed on was that they couldn't stand the other.

"If we say we have no sin, then the truth is not in us, and we deceive ourselves." (1 John 1:8)

"Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, now we have peace with God through our Lord, Jesus Christ." (Romans 5:1)

These two verses, the first from John's epistle and the second by Paul in Romans 5, form the twin axes by which the truth of Jesus unites our duality. John tells us that our sinfulness is an obvious component of who we are, as impossible to miss as a lighthouse on a pier. We can't lie about it- God already knows about our sin, all of it- and we can't do anything about it. And God's word shows us his standard: perfection.  The Law. Then, in Romans, Paul tells us that through faith in Jesus we can have peace with God. Christ accomplished what we could not- freedom from wrath- and gave it to us. Grace.

The cross of Jesus is the joining point of the Law and Grace. In my case, the Law shone a spotlight on my everywhere else-ness and showed me how my actions were wrong. Grace broke my churchiness and showed me that all my self-righteousness never fooled anybody, let alone God. At the cross they both fell, begging for mercy, and both received God's love and forgiveness. At that moment they agreed to peace and shook hands in detente. I never felt better.

The Swear Cam reveals the same dichotomy in coaches that the cross resolves in us. We no longer have to be split entities, as coaches often are, operating one way on the sidelines and another away from it. We do not have one part of us that is acceptable to God and another that is shameful and needs to be hidden. We can walk in self-unity. This path to wholeness runs through the truth of Calvary, where the Law hung Jesus in condemnation of all of our sins, while the radical love of God bore that condemnation just so that God could have us, and for no other reason.

As sports fans, we like our coaches. When they lead our teams to the Quaker State Engine Viscosity Bowl or the semi-finals of the Great Pedestrian Shoot-Out, it makes us feel good. But the next time you see the Swear Cam on your TV screen, remember that it's secretly grace- God's grace to the coach to let us see his whole person, flaws and all, and His grace to us to remind us of the burden we no longer have to bear.

 MASCOT

There are lots of reasons not to envy the person in the mascot suit when you go to a sporting event.

For one, "the person" is, more often than not, a college sophomore working his or her way toward a competitive, highly useful degree such as Advanced Wii Bowling, or Psychology. They are as interested in entertaining your family as you are in using that hot nacho cheese as contact lens solution. This is mostly due to the self-esteem destroying costumes that mascots are forced to wear, usually of mutant animals with names like Barry the Bat-Frog, or Carl the Sabre-Toothed Family Therapist.

For another, if the mascot is working in minor league baseball, he has the hardest job in all of sports, which is not beating the little kid in that "You start at home, I'll start at second base and we'll race!" game. I keep waiting for the day when a mascot, knowing that it's his last day on the job, just flat-out wins the thing. He'll take off in a dead sprint for home plate, then double back to tell the poor losing child that there's no Santa Claus and, as he's led away in handcuffs, scream out the Facts Of Life. I only hope that I'm in the stands to see it when it happens.

But my point is that being a mascot is difficult work. I know this because I myself have paid some dues inside a mascot costume: I once dressed up like the Genie from Disney's 'Aladdin' for a parade. I wish I had a better reason for doing it, such as my appearance was required at a U.N. peacekeeping summit. "Andrew, put on the costume- nobody will sign the treaty unless they see a Robin Williams impression!" "Please hurry! Both parties are outraged that they cannot sing "A Whole New World' with the Genie and are threatening to riot!" But mostly, it was because I had the least amount of work in the office that day, and I required no amount of alcohol or bonus money to get in character. James Lipton would have been proud.

I'm glad I did it, too, because now I know that the mascot outfit is the kind of interrogation tactic we truly need to win the War on Terror.

Terrorist: I'll never tell you anything!

Marine: Perhaps your mind will change after ten minutes IN THE SQUIRREL COSTUME!

That parade was a life-changing event in the sense that I almost asphyxiated inside the rubber Genie face I was wearing. I challenge anyone living one of those so-called "Best Lives Now" to consider it so without the experience I had in the parade: running the equivalent of several dozen suicides while wearing a blue silicone mask, delighting children as you mime, cartwheel, and crash full speed into a stationary golf cart that you couldn't see through the raisin-sized eyeholes. Joel Osteen can't give you that.

Yet mascots are a necessary evil. They serve as a physical representation of the team, an extension of the kind of attitude or spirit the team should evidence. Mascots give the fans something more concrete than just "the team" to identify with- they are something to look at, something to touch, something to take souvenir photos with. A mascot is an external representation of the much larger idea of that team. And so when a fan sees a mascot-like Chief Osceola, the Stanford Tree, or a Mary Kay car- they're reminded, more strongly than without the mascot, of the team that they support.

On the night he was betrayed Jesus and his disciples shared a meal together. Before they ate, Jesus took a loaf of bread and a cup of wine. As he broke the bread and poured the wine he told his disciples, "This is my body, given for you.....this cup is my blood, poured out for you....whenever you eat this, remember me." (Luke 22:24) This is the moment of institution for one of the sacraments of the church: the Eucharist, the Lord's Table, or as it's known in Protestantism, communion- the mascot of Christianity.

When several of the apostles reported Jesus' resurrection back to the group, Thomas famously exclaimed that he would not believe it unless he touched the nail marks in Jesus' hands and the spear wound in his side. This episode prompted Thomas to be nicknamed 'Doubting Thomas'. I like a better, nickname for him, however: Thomas the Toucher.

Jesus gave the church the sacrament of Communion for many reasons. But one of the simplest reasons comes in the final words of institution: "...whenever you do this, remember me." Jesus knows that we as fallen humans are forgetful people. We forget, sometimes with alarming quickness (as much of the stories of the Israelites in the Old Testament attest) what God has done for us in the past and the ways that we have seen Him work. We lose sight of Him, and we doubt.

When we doubt, our natural touch-iness takes over our spiritual lives. Like Thomas, we want to put our hands on something. And so, in the perceived absence of God, we grab onto anything else we can to stabilize our spiritual selves. Those things can be a charismatic spiritual leader, a hip, exciting church, a successful job or ministry, or even a spiritual feeling. Whatever that "it" is, our fingers twitch for it as Thomas' did for Jesus' wounds. We want to roll that thing around in our hands and feel its weight, because for us touching and remembering are connected.

Jesus knows this about us, and provides communion to be that thing we touch- "...do this in remembrance of me". The bread and wine become the joining point of our forgetfulness and God's faithfulness. Communion proclaims the external reality, regardless of our inward feeling, that Christ's sacrifice accomplishes our salvation. It pulls us up from the stormy waters of our soul where we sank, doubting, in the waves while we searched for a sign of Him.  Eat this, feel the bread on your tongue. Drink this, feel the wine in your throat. In each, come remember that I am real. Taste and see.

Communion is a sacrament, and Augustine defined a sacrament as "a visible sign of an invisible reality." What else is a mascot besides that? The very impulse that informs our need to have a 9 foot tall animal represent our sports teams also guided the apostle Thomas- touching something with our senses makes that thing more real. And in that way, communion is the mascot of Christianity. In taking hold of the elements we testify, not only to our need to touch Jesus or His command that we always remember Him, but also to God's grace in knowing that we would need the former to help do the latter.

CAMERON DOLLAR

Behind-the-back dribbles usually don't get famous.

Frankly, in the repertoire of dribbling moves that say "I just schooled you and made it look like a Broadway show," behind-the-back usually takes a back seat to between-the-legs and the killer crossover. It's been awhile since I've watched an And-1 mix tape, but I doubt they're stacked top to bottom with behind-the-backs. Bottom line: it's just a slower and less awe-inspiring way to get to the rim these days. It's like driving a recent model Mustang- still pretty hot, but probably not as much so as one would like to think.

But Tyus Edney didn't care about any of that. All he knew was that this was 1995, he was the point guard of UCLA , and the Bruins were one of the best teams in the country. Yet he had the ball in an impossible situation: 3 seconds remained in the NCAA tournament against Missouri, UCLA was down one point, and there was somebody in his way. With a flash of his hand, Edney dribbled behind his back, sprinted by his defender to the rim and laid the ball in, finishing one of the most famous moments in tournament history. This moment enjoys such fame that whenever CBS shows a highlight reel of great tournament events, his lay-up is always shoulder-to-shoulder with video of Christian Laettner at the foul line, Bryce Drew in mid-air and a euphoric Jim Valvano running around the court looking to hug any carbon-based life form.

I bring all this up mostly to talk about the guy who inbounded the ball- Cameron Dollar. Several games later, Tyus Edney hurt his wrist in the semi-final game against Oklahoma State and was ruled out for the championship game. Dollar, a sophomore guard who was not logging major minutes, stepped into the limelight in the championship game against the Arkansas Razorbacks, a team known for its full-court pressure defense: "Forty Minutes of Hell"

In this press, Corey Beck and the rest of the Razorbacks** hounded and terrorized teams from the opening tip-off. The constant harassment essentially lobotomized opposing point guards, grinding them into drooling basket cases incapable of bringing the ball upcourt. It would have posed a stiff test even to Edney, the experienced senior. Cameron Dollar was a sophomore, and would be asked to run the UCLA offense on the biggest collegiate stage against the most intimidating defense UCLA would face that year. In the history of understudies, this was like replacing Laurence Olivier with Dolph Lundgren.

**- Scotty Thurman excepted. His rainbow threes may have been glorious, but physically I remember him making Khalid El-Amin look like Shawn Bradley.

All Cameron Dollar did was step up and deliver a clutch Finals performance for the ages- six points, eight assists, 4 steals, and (the defining statistic against the Arkansas pressure) zero turnovers.

After the game, Tyus Edney graduated and went on to a modest professional career, first with the Sacramento Kings and later overseas. Cameron Dollar stayed two more years and enjoyed a good career, although he never became a star and never played professionally. Just as Tyus Edney to this day remains known mostly for that behind-the-back dribble, Cameron Dollar's lasting claim to fame is his ice-cold performance against Arkansas.

I love the story of Cameron Dollar because it blows up this 'myth of readiness' that I still buy into sometimes. I routinely think that I shouldn't go do something until I "feel ready", and I have the axioms to back it up. Look before you leap. Measure twice, cut once. Make the game come to you. These are all good pieces of wisdom, spoken to temper our actions with good judgment, and yet I often use them to justify sitting on the sidelines.

Cameron Dollar wasn't necessarily called upon when he was good and ready. There was no smooth transition or apprenticeship where he could perfectly prepare himself. Tyus Edney didn't come up to him as a freshman and tell him "Cameron, here's what will happen. I'll play a few championship games, and you just watch. Then when the time comes to play one you'll be totally and completely prepared. You'll never have to take on a situation that's a little too much for you." Instead, Tyus Edney hurt his wrist, and 48 hours later Cameron Dollar went from no-pressure backup guard to running the UCLA offense against the most threatening defense of his era. Think he felt "ready"?

I don't know where I came up with the idea that I had to be ready for each and every situation I would ever encounter before I would embrace it. It certainly wasn't reality. Life doesn't treat us this way, nor does God do this with us. There is never a balance between our feeling of readiness to do something and the necessity of the situation that calls us to do it. More often the imbalance between our readiness and the need for action in life is so great it feels like it might topple our whole life over.

God loves to do this with us, too. In the book of Judges, an angel appears to Gideon and tells him to lead Israel against the nation of Midian, which had trampled their crops and impoverished the Israelites.**

W"hen the angel of the LORD appeared to Gideon, he said, "The LORD is with you, mighty warrior."

"But sir," Gideon replied, "if the LORD is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonders that our fathers told us about when they said, 'Did not the LORD bring us up out of Egypt?' But now the LORD has abandoned us and put us into the hand of Midian."

The LORD turned to him and said, "Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian's hand. Am I not sending you?"

"But Lord," Gideon asked, "how can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family."

The LORD answered, "I will be with you, and you will strike down all the Midianites together.""

Gideon's feelings of un-readiness practically leap off the page at us. He ignores that the Angel calls him 'mighty warrior.' He thinks God has abandoned the Israelites. And he focuses on the smallness of his social stature- "...my clan is the weakest...and I am the least." Yet what does God say? "Oh, you're right. I'm sorry, I must have the wrong Gideon... you're Gideon Purcell? From Manasseh? I'm looking for Gideon Ackerman, from Naphtali. He must have moved and not left a forwarding address." Of course not. He tells Gideon this: "Go in the strength you have."

Go in the strength you have. Are we ready for the things God asks us to do? Probably not. The truth is, we're always more ready than we feel, but more un-ready than we'll need to be. That is where God had Gideon, and where he usually wants us- at the scorer's table pulling off our warm-ups, with no choice but to play. Don't believe me? Just ask Cameron Dollar.

**- inspiration for the Gideon portion of this goes to Dr. Richard Allen Farmer, whose sermon on Gideon can be found on YouTube and fits perfectly with the theme of readiness I explore with Cameron Dollar.

 WAKEBOARD

My family are not boat people. Growing up, the closest the Larson clan ever got to boating was the time we went for a cruise on my uncle's boat in Tennessee. I got it in my head that we were going to run out of gas, be marooned on the water and die. My uncle lied to me and told me that the gas meter moved backwards, and that we were actually gaining gas as we tooled around the lake. This was ludicrous, even to an 8 year old. Nowhere in the Bible had I found the story of Jesus multiplying diesel fuel.

Later we started vacationing in Michigan at a cabin on the shore of Lake Huron. There, for one week each summer, we were surrounded by boats, which interested us as much as being surrounded by 11 varieties of manila folder. Canoes, Sunfish, kayaks, catamarans, sloops- we had our choice of water-borne transportation, and yet it took almost 12 years for my brother to become the first Larson with genuine seamanship.

He's still the only one. I can't sail- I never outgrow thinking that the wind is coming from whatever direction I happen to be facing at the moment. But my aquatic recreation skills are growing. I'm an excellent first mate on any boat my brother is sailing, which means that I do what I'm told and don't weigh very much. My kayaking is improving, although my path through the water typically resembles calligraphy. And I can also wakeboard.

Wakeboarding is great because it's not water-skiing. Wakeboarding is simple. There's only one thing to keep track of- a single board strapped to your feet. If you can stand on it, you can ride it. Water-skiing is too complicated- if wakeboarding is a pony ride, water-skiing is like saddling up a velociraptor. You're going to put slender boards on each of my feet, and then demand that my brain process information and coordinate movement on both of them while I'm skipping across a lake at high speeds? Is this really what the Founding Fathers had in mind?

Thomas Jefferson: Gentlemen of the Continental Congress, something has come to my attention that requires our most ardent and zealous observance! Something monumental! Something affecting the very meaning of the phrase 'the pursuit of happiness'! Something that will finally help Paul Revere pick up girls! I'm talking about Benjamin Franklin's invention of something called "water-skiing".

Paul Revere (from the back): Not cool, bro!

John Hancock: Yet another innovation! What a colossal genius this Franklin is! An intellect touched by the divine!

Benjamin Franklin: Indubitably. During a moment of bathtub fervor, I envisaged a way for a man to ride behind a swiftly moving boat on top of a flat panel of some length. I tested this theory using a door I stole from the French courts as I fled the country, and the getaway boat I chartered. I later substituted two small planks on each foot for the door, and voila! Water-skiing. It was great jolliness, and I must say this: Mr. Revere, the ladies found it very well.

Revere: Please excuse me, gentlemen. I believe there is a door I must go remove from its hinges.

Hancock: A maestro of all things scientific! Ben Franklin, a titan of knowledge among our Lilliputian intellects! Without peer! Huzzah!

John Adams: Ben, what were you doing in the water in the first place?

Franklin: I sought relief in the sea-water from a curious bout of inflammation I picked up during my time in Paris.

(room goes quiet.)

I think it was food poisoning.

Jefferson: Mr. Franklin, this is well and fine with your invention- we all see clearly its virtues. In fact, as I look out the window, I notice Mr. Revere donning his life-jacket with several of the town's more winsome damsels. But to this I must call attention: that in inventing water-skiing, you violate Ockham's Razor through needless complication. Two boards is too many, and not everyone can do it; it's aristocratic. Use one board alone, call it "wake boarding" and be done with it. The common man wins- the American dream!

Adams: I must interject with my own thoughts here, as they are of the vastest importance, and prudence dictates that I ponder them in my heart alone no longer! Can we pass a bill requiring that, should someone make a television mini-series of my life, George Clooney or someone of equal handsomeness be cast to play myself? I have heard rumors that Paul Giamatti will star. This is unacceptable.

Franklin: I stand by my invention! Two boards allows for a most pleasing slaloming action that allows me to do a 360 with massive air.

Jefferson: Outrageous! I motion that we censure this poppycock with great haste, in the name of democracy! Who stands with me? It is only reasonable! Point of fact: I have heard that just recently didst General Washington wakeboard across the Delaware.

Adams: At least let Katie Holmes play Abigail. I have a screenplay idea where I'm a detective infiltrating the Triads with Jet Li, and I think it will really play in Peoria.

Hancock: Thomas, you might want to get outside. Revere is giving hands-on instruction to Martha Jefferson, and he's wearing his "100% American Beef" shirt.

Franklin: Has anyone seen my lotion?

One of the most difficult parts of learning to wakeboard is standing up on the board. You start off bobbing in the water as you try to put the board on your feet, occasionally tipping to one side like a depressed sea lion. Once strapped in, you make futile attempts to grab the rope as it floats by. After several go's you realize that this is a brilliant idea for a workout video ("Splash desperately as you reach for the rope in the manner of a drowning camel. This really works your traps and delts! "). Finally, with the rope firmly in hand, the boat accelerates, dragging you several feet until you pitch into the lake face-first, enjoying the sensation of water clearing a snowmobile trail through your sinuses. You then resume bobbing, waiting to try again, now furious at Benjamin Franklin.

The trick to standing up on a wakeboard is to let the boat do the work. At first this doesn't seem natural. Every instinct tells you to pull yourself up, but those instincts, so well-sharpened for landlubbing at normal speed, are poorly calibrated for water movement at Mach 8. Microsoft Water-Ski Simulater cannot prepare you. You are not instrument rated for this. And you will fall. A lot.

We're not really instrument rated for the life of grace, either. The whole thing leaves us confused. You mean I don't do anything to make it happen? Like the wakeboard, we want to haul ourselves up and stand, never bothering to notice that the boat is already going, that it has its own power that it pulls us with, and that we really don't need to do much to get moving. Grace, God's goodness to us through the person of Jesus, provides all the momentum we need.

Grace is propulsive because it's the truth, and our acceptance of Christ's sacrifice hitches us permanently to it. We're buckled into the wakeboard the moment we kneel at the cross, and then we're off. The boat speeds away; God never lets us go. All we have to do is stand up.

This helplessness is what is really meant by that old Christian cliche of 'broken-ness'. Typically we think of broken-ness as groveling, or affecting a lowly station in life, or inner despair over our sin. We pursue these attitudes through internal self-destruction: I'm so this, I always do that, Lord I'm awful, I'm vermin, don't let anything good happen to me, etc. And when the battering is over, we justify it by saying that we just want to be more humble, more obedient, more broken. And it works, too. We break.

I know we do this because I've done this. I still do it. But I don't do it because I want to be humble. I do it because deep inside I think that I'm unworthy. That's self-loathing. "How dare God build something beautiful inside me," I say, and then I tear that building down. "God doesn't know who I really am! He doesn't know my secret nature!" Except He does know. That's the 'me' He loves, and died for. That's grace.

Broken-ness may have made SonicFlood rich enough to buy their own archipelago, but what broken-ness really means is that we trust God enough not to wrestle with the rope we're holding, or argue that we're too sinful to be allowed to ride. When it comes to wakeboarding life of grace, God pulls, and we stand.

Grace never throttles down either, through sunshine or storm. Like the Dawn Treader, it goes all the way to the very edge of the world and then over. We must be broken enough to stand, but confident enough to ride there. And smart enough to keep Paul Revere away from our wives.

NBA JAM

I always struggle for an answer when people ask what I wanted to be when I grew up.

This is partially because the answer changed a lot. The question of vocational destiny is a moving target in childhood, owing as much to what toy they have played with most recently as to serious deliberation on a future career path. My own responses to that question included (if no cartoons had been watched that day) a baker, neurosurgeon, second baseman, or a contestant on Jeopardy. And if cartoons had been watched that day, I wanted to be David the Gnome.

But the struggle also stems from the fact that I don't want to give an honest answer to the question. Because truthfully, I just wanted to be one thing when I grew up: Scott Hunt's best friend.

Scott Hunt was the son of our next door neighbors, a sixteen or seventeen year old with reddish-brown hair and a lanky, vascular build. The brim of his baseball cap was always bent into a perfectly cool half-circle, and he was an excellent athlete. I have no doubt that, like most teenagers, his desire was to live a life free of hassle from eight year olds. This was a problem, because I idolized him.

To say that I worshipped the ground that Scott Hunt walked on is not hyperbole. It might even be more accurate to say that I regarded him with the same healthy perspective later immortalized in the classic buddy-comedy Single White Female.

My go-to move looked like this: I would sit at our kitchen table and monitor the Hunt's driveway with an observational power more akin to deep space telescopes, in hopes that Scott would come outside to throw tennis balls against the side of their house. When he did, I would rush across our yard and try to impress him with outrageous lies, either about my nonexistent sporting exploits, or how I owned exclusively Umbro clothes except for whatever I was wearing right then. I would also beg to drive his remote controlled cars- the cordless ones with the nine volt battery and the trigger-controlled handset- which I was fascinated by, and, when given my chance, nearly involve in 1.1 car pileups in the street. In retrospect, he deserved some kind of medal.

But although I basically stalked Scott Hunt, I did so with an innocent heart and pure intentions**. What was more likely at play was the same murky impulse that once led me to invent a fictional older brother and then tell my fourth grade teacher that he had died in a car accident. Which is to say that I often felt insecure and unsure of myself, and I craved validation from someone older and more confident. Also, that I was weird.

**- Now that I type it, this is basically the Stalker Motto.

I say this so that, when I mention that Frank Schmitt and I once spied on Scott playing NBA Jam on Sega Genesis through the Hunt's living room window, like actors in the Disney Channel remake of 'Rear Window', it will be understood that this was perfectly in character for me, and also probably the least insane thing I did that day.

Again, there was no weirdness intended. Frank and I were just really obsessed with NBA Jam. It helps to remember that, at that cultural instant, NBA Jam was a Stage 4 Youth Juggernaut. While Frank and I were window-shopping at Scott's house, kids nationwide were mobbing the arcade version of NBA Jam, trading fistfuls of sweaty quarters for ten minutes with an even sweatier joystick. The home console version enjoyed equal success, with sales driven in large part by the following exchange, some variation of which was had by 18.3 million parents in the early 1990′s.

CHILD: Can I get Mortal Kombat for my birthday? PLEASE?

PARENT: (looks at Mortal Kombat box, which features players throwing harpoons, tearing out other people's hearts, and decapitating one another) Let's try this basketball game instead.

How Frank and I managed to get our hands on a copy of NBA Jam remains one of the true mysteries of my childhood, one that can't be solved even with the benefit of hindsight. I know my parents were too savvy just to buy it for us, although they would, in later years, fall for the classic "If you buy us Product X**, we will repay you for it by doing its money value in chores!" plan that never actually works out.

**– In our case, a giant trampoline.

It's more likely that Frank and I pooled our modest savings and bought it ourselves. The split was 60%/40%, with my 60% buying me the right to keep the game at my house where the Sega was. Frank's 40% bought him the right to, at first, come and play it whenever he wanted, and later, to realize that he had basically bought somebody else a video game. This is the kind of bad financial deal that almost every friend tandem makes together at some point, regardless of age (the adult version is called a 'time share'). Hopefully Dave Ramsey will include it in a future book of money advice for kids, titled Debt Stinks: How the Scent of Borrowed Money Helps Monsters Find and Devour You.

The story of Zaccheus in Luke 19 is the Bible's version of me Stalking Scott Hunt For His Video Games. Most people are familiar with Zaccheus' story from his Sunday School jingle, although when I say that it is "his", I am implying it is about him, not that he composed it himself.

Luke's Biblical account of Zaccheus' tree-climbing escapade surprises our childhood memories with what's missing from it. We know Zaccheus' occupation and social standing (v. 2 "...he was the chief tax collector in the region, and he had become a very rich man."). We know that something compelled him to see Jesus in Jericho (v. 3 "...he tried to get a look at Jesus, but was too short..."). The text tells us that he was known to be corrupt (v. 7, the people refer to him as a "notorious sinner"). And we know that Zaccheus ultimately repents of his sins, (v. 8, offering to give "half my wealth to the poor....and if I have cheated people on their taxes, I will give them back four times as much."

What's absent from the story, however, is motive. Luke's prose is a journalist's dream, giving us the who, when, where and what. But why? What drives Zaccheus into a tree just to see Jesus? And what happens from the tree to the house that changes his attitude?

One option we have is to speculate. We can guess that Zaccheus rushed to to the tree because he was guilt-ridden over his tax-cheating ways. We can guess that just one moment with the Lord was enough to overwhelm Zaccheus' pride and flip his heart into a devoted Jesus follower. And all of those things not only might be correct, they probably are.

But another option is to accept the text as it is, void of insight into Zaccheus' motives. When we do that, something interesting happens. Zaccheus' story wriggles free from our preconceived notions. It leaves behind the Sunday School lessons we've heard about Zaccheus' need to see Jesus ("What tree have you climbed to see the Lord lately?") or about making restitution for our mistakes. It sheds all the baggage of teaching ways to show God that we are really super-serious about following Him this time.

Instead, it tells us this, in verse 5: "When Jesus walked by, he saw Zaccheus and called him by name."

I have no idea what impulse made Zaccheus want to see Jesus so badly. And I don't know what Zaccheus thought would happen when he saw Jesus. The Bible doesn't tell us, either. But I know why I watched Scott Hunt play video games through his living room window, and what I hoped would happen: I wanted to be called out to.

NBA Jam may have been what initially drew me to the window, just as the crowds and the spectacle may have been the lure for Zaccheus. But deep in my heart, what I wanted was for Scott to come out on his deck, call my name, and invite me inside to play with him. I wanted the same moment that Zaccheus had with Jesus when they locked eyes for the first time, his adrenaline spiking as Jesus called his name. "Get down here, Zaccheus! I am coming to your house today!"

The story of Zaccheus is not about our ingenuity in getting seen by Jesus, but about how Jesus calls to us. He calls us by name, from whatever trees we've climbed to get a glimpse of him, certain in our insecurity that he will pass us by. He invites himself into our personal worlds, ignoring the gathered crowd of our past actions that condemn us as well-known sinners. And he ushers us into the Kingdom life with words of salvation: "...for this man has shown himself to be a true son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and save the lost." (v.9)

To seek and save the lost. While our motives for seeking Jesus may be as vague as Zaccheus' were, Jesus' motives for calling to us are not. While Zaccheus chose wisely, running to a tree over a Jericho street where Jesus would be, our lost-ness sometimes sends us to the wrong trees, looking for other avenues of salvation, like I was at Scott's house.

It doesn't matter. Jesus knows what we were really looking for, who we were when he saw us, and he calls to us anyway. In that call is the blessing we crave- of knowing that Jesus knows us, and has a unique interest in us as individuals, not just as faces in a crowd. We can say that 'he is coming to our house today'. Or just say that he wants to play some NBA Jam with us.

 SCOUT

In 1948 the New York Yankees sent a scout named Tom Greenwade to Kansas. The object of his attention was a third baseman, late of the Baxter Springs Whiz Kids., named Billy Johnson. The Whiz Kids were an under-21 semi-pro baseball team, and southeastern Kansas' finest one at that. They were part of a vast nebula of loosely professional teams that operated in the Midwest in those days. Some were solvent enough to pay their players actual money, but most only paid in memories and trips to towns that not even Carmen San Diego could find.

Billy Johnson was an eventual big leaguer with the Yankees and Cardinals, and on that day Tom Greenwade had been dispatched to Baxter Springs to scout him. The Yankees paid Greenwade for his keen eye for talent, and his willingness to go anywhere to find it took him to scout countless players just like Billy Johnson.

But at this particular game, it was instead a gopher-toothed, towheaded teen with a battered Frank Crosetti glove that caught Greenwade's eye. Greenwade marveled at the two home runs this boy sent skinny-dipping into the Spring River, and then rushed back to New York with a breathless report. He had just seen the most amazing prospect in the middle of nowhere. The kid was a prodigy from the mining town of Commerce, OK, a 15 year old with cheetah-like speed and Herculean power named Mickey Mantle. Tom Greenwade was one of the first to see a future Hall of Famer- just another day in the life of a scout.

In the body of an athletic organization, scouts are the capillaries and corpuscles. While GM's and Vice Presidents are the nerve center of decision making, and the athletes themselves are the muscles that move, scouts are those spiderwebs of veins, invisible to the eye, that connect valuable resources to the brain that can use them.

Discovering a talent like Mickey Mantle is the apex of a career for a lifetime scout like Tom Greenwade. Scouts consider themselves privileged if they unearth one or two celestial talents in their careers. To do so, they hustle and network all over the world in search of undiscovered athletic talent. The lucky ones are a Tom Greenwade or Jerry Krause, who stumbled upon the embryonic talent of Scottie Pippen in an Arkansas gymnasium, or Kevin Bacon from "The Air Up There".

The unlucky scouts get no such validation. The hustling and networking are the same, and they spend their careers in the same backwater gyms and dusty ballparks of Small Town and Inner City USA. They wire reports to the head office about 'skill set this' and 'plus talent that'. But when they retire, riches and glory do not follow them- there are no legendary scouts, except among other scouts. Their legacy adds up to a bundle of receipts from Quizno's, 380,000 miles on their Datsun, and thousands of hours logged in bleachers watching teenagers play sports. Scouts, in a very literal way, leave their life in a field.

The image of leaving life in a field shows up in the Bible, although you have to do some leg-work to get there. In Matthew 13, Jesus tells a parable about the experience of finding the Kingdom of Heaven:

"The Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure that a man discovered in a field. In his excitement he hid it again and sold everything he owned to get enough money to buy the field."

The point of the parable is that this treasure the man discovers is the Gospel, the good news about the world and the truth about Jesus. Later in Matthew, Jesus says that whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever will lose his life will save it. When you combine those two statements, you get a super-parable** that says this: the kingdom of heaven is so valuable that you should do anything possible to gain it (as Paul says in Philippians 3:11), and according to Jesus, the price you pay is to lose your life. Put more simply, you leave your life in a field.

**- I am a trained professional. Not intended for children under the age of 4, as this is a choking hazard, use as directed. All rights reserved. See our booth at the ReSurge CataBlast Conference, featuring Young Media Savvy Pastor, and Older Respected Scholar, brought to you by Generic Foundation for Clean Water and Wi-Fi in Places That Have Neither.

In John 12:24 Jesus explicitly teaches this paradigm of life springing from death. "I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed," he says. "But if it dies, it produces many seeds. The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life"

Nobody knows exactly where Jesus died- it was on a hill called Golgotha, somewhere outside of Jerusalem, and probably not a field. But when you're the son of God, clothed in humility and stripped of the majesties of heaven while on Earth, everywhere is a field in comparison. And with one crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus grew firstfruits from our barren and desolate soil, sending seed after seed into the world to yield a bumper crop too vast for any number of silos. Jesus' death brought life.

Likewise, by dying in the field, a scout brings life. He exists to guide others to their destinies, and to do it he loses his life driving countless back roads and peering through infinite chain link fences. Without the liaison of the scout, the link between athlete and team is never made. A whole career that could be spent batting balls, throwing touchdowns or scaring pilots by carrying a javelin through airport security on the way to the Olympics, never materializes. If you're an athlete, the difference between living doing the thing you love most and dying doing something else is the scout.

In Revelation 21, God says "Behold, I am making all things new! Write these words down, for they are trustworthy and true." God inaugurates this redemption in Jesus' and continues it with the life of every believer in whatever field they're in. We can die in a field in faraway countries or in 6 by 6 cubicles, either pouring ourselves out for the poverty-stricken or the owner of a mini-van. In either case we might feel like we're wasting our lives. But God promises to us the same thing he promises the scout: that where we may leave our moments in apparent futility, life will spring.

 CHRIS JACKSON

I can't remember the first time Sports Illustrated came to our house.

I know it was a big deal. I begged for it for years; mostly, I think, for the free sweatshirt and cheap watch they gave as gifts for subscribing. Granted, the sweatshirts were all sized on the Paul Bunyan scale, and the watch told time with the idiosyncratic rhythm of a funk bassist. But I didn't care. Before the Internet, before ESPN.com, Sports Illustrated WAS the Internet. When I heard the news of our subscription, I almost certainly stopped reading my Myst strategy guide (more exciting than the actual game) and gave thanks. Sports were coming! To our house! Provided Dad threw away the swimsuit issue first!

I still have almost every issue at my parents' house. For reasons unknown (what does anyone need with a 13 year old feature story on Dan Majerle?**), I still refuse to throw any of them away. So now we have hundreds of back issues, and they're reproducing like Fibonacci's sequence. The overflow has turned perfectly useful closets into fire code violations with 1996 NFC Previews inside.

**- Aside from the obvious academic value.

For a kid just coming into a deep love of sports, subscribing to SI was like having pure heroin delivered to the door once a week. The cover of my first issue showed Emmitt Smith galloping with a football like he was escaping with the Lindbergh baby, 49er defenders falling off him like sailors going overboard. For years afterward, like marking an anniversary, I would sometimes look up from the current SI I was reading and ask myself, Do you remember the first cover? Emmitt. Yes.

One of my all-time favorite SI articles is a Rick Reilly profile of Chris Jackson. In 1993 Chris Jackson was a 2nd year point guard on the Denver Nuggets. He was one of the most prolific college scorers of his era, playing alongside Shaquille O'Neal at LSU during his amateur career. He was an improving NBA player, the 3rd pick in the NBA draft. Reilly's article chronicled Jackson's daily battle with Tourette's syndrome. Among other rituals, the disease forced Jackson to touch hot stove tops until they felt 'right', compulsively tie and re-tie shoelaces, and shoot jumpers in the gym until ten in a row swished the perfect way.

I read this article and my eleven year old, basketball-crazed brain immediately missed the point. I went out to my driveway, or the gym, and mimicked the scenes from the article. Ten in a row. Must swish perfectly. It made Chris Jackson good. In my mind's eye I could see it happening just the way I read it. Every swish had to *snap* just so, and that led to hours alone outside, practicing my shot just like Chris Jackson. Even today when I play basketball, I sometimes feel a little tug to try the ritual again. Come on Andrew, ten in a row again, perfect swish. Try it.

No other article I've ever read in Sports Illustrated has stuck with me as this one has. Perhaps it's because I lived a little of it, but that image of a perfect swish, over and over, has stayed with me through the years. Chris Jackson has long since left the NBA. I have grown up too- 16 years have passed, and in that time I've read enough sports books to fill Jay Leno's antique car garage. But I have never been able to forget the image of Chris Jackson on the hardwood, like King David, keeping his Goliath compulsions at bay with his slingshot jumper.

After a few seasons in the NBA Chris Jackson converted to Islam, and now isn't Chris Jackson at all, but Mahmoud Abdul Rauf. Sometimes, I wonder if he prayed during those endless practice sessions. As he cocked his elbow, knowing that his malfunctioning brain would force him to shoot again, and again, and then again, I wonder if he cried out for God to heal him. I imagine he did. I wonder if each rebound he chased felt like an unanswered prayer. I imagine it did.

Everyone remembers their first unanswered prayer. Mine was to fall asleep at night. I was a child insomniac in the era after the "experts" decided that bedtime whiskey shots were child abuse. Instead, I took doses of melatonin large enough to sedate an anaconda. I bought enough relaxation tapes to make Spinoza Bear Co. the fourth largest conglomerate in the world and a full voting member of NATO.

None of those things worked. I was one of the first people to ever hear Dave Ramsey on the radio- and if you think being a kid awake in the dark all alone is creepy, try it with someone shrieking "I'M DEBT FREE!!!" out of the radio. I still remember lying in bed, asking God to please let me fall asleep this time. This happened every night. It still happens today. God has never answered that prayer.

Unanswered prayer is the worm in the apple of Christian life. Just when we thought we had the Christian life fully mapped, prayer reminds us that parts of it remain unknown to us. Despite our countless explorers and cartographers, there are still frontiers left, uncharted places in the spiritual universe where the edges of the world are blurry and the natives are mysterious.

In this way, prayer humbles us. We might perfect our morality. Our obedience can be executed with ease. And we may buff and polish our theology to a showroom-quality gleam. But something as simple as praying makes a mockery of our supposedly expert Christian efforts.

Just when we think we're making headway, getting better, finally coming up with some prayers that actually work, something gives way under our feet. Our prayers go unanswered- sometimes, it seems, never making past the ceiling in the first place. They bounce away from us, as Chris Jackson's did, and we're left as he was: beaten, desperate, feeling foolish. Shouldn't we be good at this by now? We're alone in a room, eyes closed, hoping that our words and thoughts and feelings translate across the ether to the God of the universe, who sometimes seems to listen and sometimes doesn't? What are we doing?

Our earlier Chris Jackson/King David comparison helps us. Check out what King David said in Psalm 22:

"My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why so far from my call for help, from my cries of anguish? My God, I call by day, but you do not answer; by night, but I have no relief.....Do not stay far from me, for trouble is near, and there is no one to help."

Sounds raw, right? One of David's greatest legacies is the record of honest prayer he left behind for us in the book of Psalms. To read David's psalms is to be given access to a pool of candid moments, both ecstatic and despondent, between a real person and a real God.

And judging by the number of passages in other psalms similar to the above selection, he had no system for making those prayers work. In that sense, David experienced the same praying frustrations that we do. We are people whose A.C.T.S have not always brought back prodigal children, whose fasting regimens have not always saved broken relationships, and whose rosaries have not always delivered us from our deepest struggles. David lived through those same moments where he felt like he was shouting at nobody and his life experiences seemed to contradict the reality of a personal God. Turns out, we're not the only ones who don't know what we're doing when it comes to prayer.

That begs the question, then: what good are the Psalms? Why study the prayers of a guy with so many unanswered ones?

True, if we're looking for special combo moves to help us win at prayer- like some kind of spiritual Street Fighter game- the Psalms will not help us. If David knew any secret techniques for getting God to answer his prayers, he surely wasn't using them, and if he was, those techniques were getting posterized in a big way.

Life with God is what we get from the Psalms instead- not a class on praying, but a portrait of a prayerful life, unanswered prayers and all. There is great value in this distinction. Through the life of David, God employs an old writer's proverb: "show, don't tell." When writers 'tell', they rupture the connection between reader and story. The reader is no longer immersed in the story but is alienated from it, hyper-aware that they are outside, not inside the story. When writers 'show', they bring us into the story, allowing us the joy of participating in its telling by being fully present

French director Jean-Luc Godard once said of the relationship between a movie and its viewer, "Film is truth at 24 frames a second, and every cut is a lie." As a portrait of a prayerful life, the Psalms are similar. They are truth at one verse per second, with no cuts. God preserves those scenes of one man doing business with Him by keeping lecturing, didactic elements off camera. There are no lists here, no PowerPoint, no "Five Things You Absolutely Must Do To Pray Effectively" to break the fourth wall. We watch David's story and learn about prayer by entering into it imaginatively- by being shown, not told.

There may be no answer to the riddle of unanswered prayer. But a prayerful life itself remains essential to the Christian life, and Chris Jackson is our unlikely model for it. Each rebound in his shooting ritual may have felt like an unanswered prayer, but it was really a line from a psalm.

 NAMATH

If I could go back in time to anywhere in history, I know exactly where I'd go.

I don't want to see Alexander Graham Bell invent the telephone, or witness the very first attempt at bungee jumping ("It's a 30 foot garden hose, I think this is going to work!"), or even the moment where the protein bar was first invented ("Look, all I'm saying is, if we put ground up rocks inside a Milky Way and tell people it has 30 grams of protein including ScorchBlaster ions, we can buy the Sacramento Kings. That's all I'm saying".)

No, I want to go to 1969, when the New York Jets played the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. I want to hide in the press conference where an upstart Jets quarterback named Joe Namath is addressing the media. I want to wait until the precise moment where he says "We're going to win this game. I guarantee it." Then, flush with the excitement of knowing that I am in the presence of a Super Bowl champion, a Hall of Famer, and a Madison Avenue icon, I want to rush the stage and smother him into unconsciousness with a Snuggie.

And as I hurdle trash cans in the street during my getaway, knowing that I've altered the space-time continuum irrevocably and now there's a possibility that neither I nor the girl from 'Secret World of Alex Mack' will ever be born, I will still have peace of mind. I've saved humanity from ever listening to another athlete guarantee victory in a big game, ever again.

The problem with doing awesome stuff is that once it happens, other people want to do it too. All the time. Ask anybody who wrote a spy thriller after Tom Clancy, or made a crime movie after Quentin Tarantino, or committed securities fraud after Martha Stewart. When Joe Namath guaranteed victory in Super Bowl III, a media firestorm erupted- no other athlete had ever said something so cocksure on a stage that big before. And because of that, Joe Namath's guarantee also guaranteed something else: that many, many other athletes would later try the same thing.

Now, 40 years later, the lame "I guarantee a victory!" quote is practically a Super Bowl tradition. It happens every year. You get the feeling these guys guarantee victory at everything, including exact change toll booths. The worst is when players from both teams make the guarantee. Then it's like someone threw a guarantee rock at an "I know somebody famous!" nest. Friends of each player swarm out to guarantee the original guarantee, and then the players' mothers, and personal trainers, and then their Call of Duty teams, and so it escalates until finally the Secretary General of the U.N. calls a press conference to guarantee victory for whoever can spell 'Hammarskjold' first.

I did some street evangelism the other day. This happened, in part, because someone asked me to do it, and I'm a people pleaser. I didn't want to look at him and say, "I really want to go share the Gospel, but I can't. Thursday night is when I do Hip Hop Abs. Maybe next time." I also didn't want to admit that I was nervous about doing this; in my mind I saw my friend shouting at me, "What do you mean, you don't want to go up to a group of total strangers, interrupt their conversation and ask if any of them want a tract? Are you ashamed of the Gospel? Are you??!! ANSWER ME!!!" But I went anyway, partially because I've never done anything like that before, and I live my life based on the idea that whatever Kirk Cameron can do, I also can do, which is why I have fourteen children.

I'm not sure what I expected, but what didn't happen was revival breaking out. Whatever the recipe is for revival to occur, we were short a few ingredients. I think it works like Voltron. First you summon the essences of history's great preachers: St. John Chrysostom, George Whitefield, and Charles Spurgeon. Then they merge bodies to form a street evangelist the size of an airplane hangar, who proclaims the Gospel while sitting on a bus like a park bench. And that did not happen.

What did happen is that nobody got saved. The reaction to our Gospel presentation varied wildly. Most people were friendly but guarded, but some were hostile. One man genuinely engaged us, eager to share his own religious viewpoints and hear ours. But another yelled "Dang it!" when he saw he'd been handed Christian reading material and spit in it as he threw it away 10 steps later.

I didn't understand. Of course, Jesus said that people would hate Christians, and virtually promised that many people would be openly antagonistic to the Gospel. That's a fact. But, fundamentally, when you share Christ, you're telling people that you believe that they're unique creations of God, died for out of love by God Himself, so that they could know him personally. Even when you add in the parts about sin and our rebelliousness, it's still a great message. So how come people hate to hear Christians talk about it?

The reason is hype. Hype is a word about decibels. It relates to sound and noise. "Did you hear all the hype about that movie?" "Everyone's talking about this game." "People are buzzing about his speech tonight." Hype is an atmosphere of interference, created by words, that surrounds the core of a real event, like a magnetic field around an electron. Experience has taught us to distrust any situation where there's a lot of talk going on, because we know that words are cheap. Hype comes easy- reality is another matter.

When we present the Gospel, people respond, not just to the propositional truth, but also to the "truth" they see lived out in the world. That's why sharing the Gospel relationally works well. People don't just hear the words of truth we share, they also anchor them to something tangible that they've seen us do- hopefully, the Jesus life lived out intentionally in front of them.

And that's precisely what makes street evangelism is so difficult. Absent a relationship with the person sharing the Gospel, the hearer substitutes in the actions of "Christians" as a group. And sadly, that involves all our hype- our multi-million dollar churches, our private schools, our Lexuses with Jesus fish on them, and any other parts of the American Christian life that don't jive with the life Jesus lived. People hear "radical transformation", but what they see is "money grab." People hear, "absolute truth" but what they see is "lifestyle choice." It looks like we as Christians are all talk. Hype.

Christianity is a seamless garment. Evangelism can't be divorced from the life that we lead as Jesus followers. When we forget that, we lose our credibility as proclaimers of truth, and become just talkers. Hype men.

When Joe Namath guaranteed victory, he was just having fun with the media spectacle that surrounded the Super Bowl. There's no harm in that. But in doing so, he created a template that many others follow. Hype is the ultimate goal. Talk is king. Unfortunately, Christians in American learned that lesson all too well. Our priorities revolve around getting on talk radio and having hip magazines and voting the right politicians into office. But that hype will always lead to losing the ability to share the Gospel well. I guarantee it.

21

8 feet.

That's the height of the basketball goal in my parents' driveway. 8 feet. It was adjustable, in theory, but in reality it was bolted in place. We never learned how it worked, and so it stayed at 8 feet for all its life, the Elephant Man goal, a refugee from the Island of Misfit Toys' sporting goods department.

My friends and I compounded its shame as teenagers. Adolescence is a time of life when a single question burns in the soul of every boy, be it literal or figurative: "Can it be dunked on?" We answered by staging a 'World's Most Expensive Dunk Contest, From The Perspective Of Our Insurance Company', in which we competed in dunk categories such as Most Aggressive, Longest Time Hanging On The Rim, and I'm Tired Bro, Just Try and Break It.

That 'bro' was the only other kid my age that lived in my neighborhood: Frank Schmitt. I met Frank when he showed up in my yard one evening while my dad and I were playing catch. His family had just moved in, and he was making friends the classic kid way- showing up at random people's houses and asking to do whatever they're doing. Frank was lean even for a six year old, tanned to the color of a baseball glove from his summer vacation in Florida, and left-handed. I'd never met a lefty before, and it fascinated me to the point of covetousness. By the time the three of us quit throwing to eat dinner, Frank and I were buddies.

Because it was just Frank and I in the neighborhood, we modified sports to fit our lack of personnel. To play football, we just stood in at opposite ends of our front yard and tried to tackle each other, careful to avoid hazards like the sidewalk, the mailbox, and the electrical transformer. Our isolation also meant that whole convoys of ghost runners kept our Wiffle Ball games moving- games that answered questions like, "Can a figment of our imagination go from first to third on a ground-out?" And when it was time for basketball, we ditched tired old one-on-one in favor of something different, something a little more street: 21.

21 ruined my basketball career. I'm not afraid to say it. 21 has as much relationship to basketball as Daniel Day-Lewis does to Thundercats. For years Frank and I spent countless summer hours playing 21- no fouls, no out of bounds, no passing, all on a rim short enough to limbo on- and this did not help my game any. Every hardwood skill I ever learned came from playing a streetball variation of basketball on an 8 foot goal against one other person who happened to be left-handed. I'm convinced that experience short-circuited a surefire Hall Of Fame career. Without 21, I would have a Fathead on your son's wall and a nickname that includes some combination of the words "highlight", "dominator", and "Big Jam". With 21, I did academic team in high school.

Here is a quick list of skills 21 taught me:

1) how to drive to the rim without getting my shot blocked with enough force to alter my DNA,

2) how to defend a larger player by fouling,

3) that I am so deadly from 19 feet that you could attach a scalpel to my jump shot and circumcise a baby on the rim.

Here is what 21 did NOT teach me to do: how to play the actual game of basketball.

During the whole time I played 21, hours upon hours, for years of my childhood, I didn't really learn to play basketball. I thought I did. I learned how to play something like basketball. 21 had all the same basic elements as basketball, like dribbling, shooting and talking trash about someone's mom. But it still wasn't basketball. It was a different game. 21 has no screens, no off-the-ball movement, and no teammates that you're forced to learn to play with. It's really not much like basketball at all. Skills may overlap between the two games, but the mentality and strategy of each differ. Yet I played it non-stop. And so each game of 21 shaped me into a basketball player- almost, but not quite.

Athletes understand and submit to this shaping dynamic. They willingly immerse their lives in games. They practice, get coached, attend clinics and watch game tape, all so that their skills will more closely align with the patterns of success in that game. They gladly finish thousands of drills and play in thousands of games, all in hopes that this repetition will make them better. No effort is wasted on the inessential. Describe this process however you want- practice, becoming 'one with the game', git er' done, whatever. I have my own favorite word- discipleship.

21 discipled me in the game of basketball, and this discipleship produced almost a basketball player. Almost, but not quite. For a long time being a Christian felt exactly this same way. I had discipleship questions- how do I follow Jesus? How do I grow in understanding God? I thought that I should do what most Christians around me did- go to church, buy Casting Crowns CD's, go to religious schools, participate in youth conferences, attend prayer meetings- and that if I did these things, I would become more like Jesus and know him better.

Except I never did. Church made me a church boy. Christian culture made me a nice guy. Neither made me much of a Jesus follower.

I spent years wondering how people became like Jesus, and then doubled down on a status quo that wasn't working. It turns out, every way I went about following Jesus was like 21- almost the real thing, but not quite.

Even my reading habits are 'almost'. I've read more Christian books in my life than Zondervan has in print- only slightly fewer than John Piper has written. I have the largest private collection of Max Lucado books outside of a Tyndale warehouse, and I keep them right next to the Mark Driscoll books, although I'm terrified that one day they'll accidentally touch and erupt like a matter/anti-matter collision, triggering Armageddon.

I have all this reading material because somewhere I got the idea that reading Christian books is just as good as reading the Bible. This is why, to this day, I can say things like, 'Oh, I think C.S. Lewis said something about that," or "That reminds me of a Watchman Nee quote," but I'll read something in Galatians or Exodus and be shocked that it's in the Bible. Turns out, I love to read about the Lord- almost, but not quite.

Discipleship is everything we do, all the time, and no less. Everything we touch affects the way we think and act. There are no neutral inputs. Movies disciple cinephiles and magazines disciple bookstore shoppers. Anger disciples those in rush hour traffic and lust disciples beach-goers. We are clay people, malleable and formable to everything that surrounds us. And it's happening every second of every day.

So when Jesus wanted to create mature followers of him, he didn't send them to a leadership boot camp, or make them fill out a workbook, or suggest that they buy a bunch of his official gear. He told them to come and follow him, and they did. They followed him everywhere for 3 years. Watched his every move. Heard his every word. Saw his miracles. Jesus' discipleship program was himself. And that's how we are discipled today. We watch him, hear him, see him, every day. Like practicing basketball, we keep constant contact with the game we want to play- in this case, the Jesus life. It won't happen by playing the church game, or the Christian culture game.

I think that's why Jesus likens himself to a spring of living water. God knows that there's nowhere we can go to escape the discipling touches of the world. We will be shaped by it. It is inevitable, and there's no running away- God called us to go into the world to share the Gospel and serve the people there. But while the discipleship of the world inevitably hardens our life-soil into parched clay, God goes to work under the surface, deep in the dark earth, where he creates His wellspring. This spring hits our rocky crust and punches through to the sunny surface. It sprays water over our thirsty lives and rains into the lives of others.

My own discipleship is a jumble of church culture, the Internet, Saturday morning cartoons, and enough Dashboard Confessional songs to turn Clint Eastwood into Nicholas Sparks. No wonder sometimes I more closely resemble a game show host than a follower of Christ. Like my basketball abilities, my almost-ness is tangible. But the Potter God has me, and you, on His wheel. In Jesus he shows us that disciples aren't made doing the almost-but-not-quite things that teach people how to do something like follow Him. It's nothing less, but nothing more, than the essential thing of following Jesus every second of every day- the opposite of 21 discipleship.

 SABERMETRICS

"What do a mama bear on the pill and the World Series have in common? No Cubs." — Harry Caray

Growing up as a Cubs fan is like attending a master class in the art of how to lose a baseball game. Each summer when I was a kid, WGN-TV beamed 120+ games into homes all over the country, 100,000 watts of day baseball sadness. Without fail, year after year, the Cubs covered every possible angle of mediocrity- they omni-sucked. They paid enormous rolls of cash to free agents that other teams wouldn't even sign to be a mascot. They hired managers barely qualified to play a Lizzie McGuire drinking game. Sometimes, they let Steve Trachsel pitch.

If there was a way to lose, the Cubs found it, and if there wasn't, they would toss Harry Caray another Budweiser and invent something new. Cubs baseball was like gamma radiation exposure: it created mutant fans with special powers. Now, the entire city of Chicago can spot a loser baseball team from as far away as the month of January.

This history with losing means that I also don't have much experience with winning. My sports experiences just haven't taught me how that works. Sure, the Cubs have managed a few good seasons in my life, but even those felt random, less like mathematics and more like a rain dance. Winning, to me, was the product of mysterious forces beyond anyone's understanding or control. And to make matters worse, I never knew when it was coming. Like a rugby hit, winning was sudden, unpredictable, and I usually blacked out.

The Cubs weren't unique in this. For many years this was, more or less, the way all baseball teams went about winning. Nobody quite knew what they were doing. Everyone knew what the very BEST baseball players looked like- they were fast, powerful, home run machines- but nobody could pinpoint what, exactly, a GOOD player looked like. Some were fast and stole bases, some hit for high average, some had great defensive skills, and some could chew 17 pieces of Bazooka Joe gum at once. And every year, teams trotted out their 9 best players, except that each manager had a different definition of what "best" was. So winning had no pattern- it mostly happened when a player had a career year, or when a scout mis-evaluated a player who turned into an All-Star. The critical question was still out there, waiting to be answered: "How do you win baseball games?"

"Do we need to have 280 brands of breakfast cereal? No, probably not. But we have them for a reason — because some people like them. It's the same with baseball statistics." — Bill James

The sacrifice bunt, except when used with the weakest hitters, does not produce positive offensive results.– Sabermetric proverb.

As Sir Isaac Newton once said after a Victorian Age swirly, for every jock, there is an equal and opposite nerd. Some of those nerds loved sports even more than the jocks, and unleashed their powerful synapses and spreadsheets on the sport of baseball. Uninterested in minor questions like "What is more likely to catch a foul ball, a 3 year old or your crotch, if the game is on national TV?", they formed a group committed to the statistical evaluation of baseball, called the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), and set out to answer the granddaddy of them all: how do you win baseball games?

The advent of crunching raw data to look for patterns of success annihilated some of baseball's conventional wisdom. Sophisticated baseball analysis brought new ideas to the table for fans to examine. 'Steals are overrated.' 'Platoons aren't always bad.' 'Strike one is a pitcher's most important pitch.' Statistics yanked away the nun mask on baseball to reveal the drunken spring breaker underneath. That peek-a-boo gave rise a new school of thought about how to win, one that gradually got a name: Saber(SABR)metrics.

Commit to the LORD whatever you do, and your plans will succeed.— Proverbs 16:3

Much like baseball, people also preoccupied with this question of winning. How do I do it well? What are some strategies to live excellently? How can I avoid failure? We are greedy for the answer to these questions. Just go to the self-help section of your local bookstore for proof. We all want that guidance to ignore foolish, un-winning approaches to life.

In the book of Proverbs, God's does for life what sabermetrics did for baseball. We get a behind-scenes tour where the magician reveals the tricks behind a few illusions. We learn how to work the angles like a champion pool hustler. A read through Proverbs equips us to walk this way. And that knowledge that gives rise to smarter paths through life, is called wisdom. Or sabermetrics.

The twist on sabermetrics is this: In 2009 the Oakland A's finished dead last in the AL West. In 2010 they finished second-to-last place. The 2010 Seattle Mariners, a cause celebre of sabermetricians, finished in last place as well. Even though sabermetrics is objective knowledge about baseball, following sabermetrics doesn't mean that you'll automatically have the best team. Even if a GM follows all the rules, accounts for all the metrics, and assembles the best team that a TI-83 can compile, it guarantees nothing. All the science in the world built the space shuttle, but it still had to make it to the moon.

The twist on Proverbs is the same. Following Proverbs to the letter doesn't guarantee a good life any more than following sabermetrics guarantees a World Series. It's easy to look at life like a casino, and Proverbs like counting cards. I don't want to admit that there are no guarantees to life, that I'm not in control, so I try to beat the game. I say, "If I just do all this stuff, Proverbs says I'll get wealth and never fail and my kids will all stay on the right path and my marriage will never be hard." I treat wisdom like a scam to guarantee that God will pay off.

Proverbs is grace to us in the form of a map. We worship a God who is good to leave us a trail through life, not wanting us to waste time searching for unmarked paths or falter in dead-end canyons. But the map just shows the way- it makes no promises about the journey. So while we pump obedience nickels into the God slot machine, hoping for the jackpot life, God ignores it and gives us something else: Jesus, the ultimate proverb. Jesus, the Way. Jesus, the Life. While Proverbs shows us how to live a smart life, Jesus shows us how to have life- life with God, but with no guarantees about the journey along the way. And no explanation about how to win at baseball.

TRIES

"He tries things."**

That's how ex-national team coach Bruce Arena once summed up the reason behind Clint Dempsey's success on the soccer field. He's right. Dempsey's career with the US national team and with English club Fulham testifies to a penchant for scoring improbable goals that other players do not. Against Juventus he drilled a 20 yard chip at an angle that allowed a 2 foot window to place the ball, and he did it with no time to look up towards the goal he shot at. "9 times out of 10 you won't make it," Dempsey said afterwards, " but you have to take that risk." Translation: he tried things.

**- This is a bowdlerized version of the original quote. Use your imagination.

That bit of wisdom popped into my mind as I watched the USA/England match during the 2010 World Cup. In that game, Dempsey let fly a tame 18 yard shot that keeper Robert Green bobbled into the net- a stunning howler that salvaged a draw for the United States and allowing them to ultimately advance in the tournament. Who else could be the beneficiary of such a charitable goal? Certainly no one but the mercurial Clint Dempsey. True to his reputation as the US national team's rogue element, Dempsey's talents have stocked his career with some of the most unpredictable goals ever scored by an American player. He's like the Magic 8 Ball. Just shake him and see what happens. He tries things.

I love that phrase. But what's Clint Dempsey and "tries things" got to do with God and grace? It's certainly not an obvious analogy on the surface. The pictures of God and grace that we see in the real world usually don't look like that. American Christianity is doesn't help. It gives us books about Amish girls and runaway bad boys that play like this:

Bad Boy: I'm on the run from the law for committing a vague, bad-but-not-too-bad crime, like non-violently stealing cars. I won this motorcycle in an underground Uno tournament, and this goatee only took me eight days to grow. Your extremely trusting father agreed that I could sleep in this hayloft while the heat cools down. Dig the bonnet.

Amish Girl: I don't know what your problem is, but there's no way I'm ever taking off this bonnet around you. I'm so offended that I'm going right up to my room to not stop thinking about you for the rest of the night. I'll probably journal about it and maybe do some quilting to drive away impure thoughts. Good night!

—— (much later)

Bad Boy: Amish Girl, I don't know what happened- maybe it was how you pushed me in the lake after I cheated at wheel rolling, or later when you secretly watched me deliver a baby calf in the rain, or even later when all the lamps burned out and we lit multiple Unity Candles to drive out the darkness- but your love and gentle spirit have redeemed me. Especially that gentle spirit. Boy, were you mild.

Amish Girl: I sure was. I'm glad you're redeemed, since my love for you was totally conditional and completely based on you changing your way of living, which I disapproved of. But now that you're different, we can be together! And not a moment too soon; I'm experiencing some serious righteous lust over here.

Bad Boy: Me too. But my passion for you is pure like A.C. Green, not that you would know who that is, since you're Amish and you've never seen basketball, let alone a non-white person. In light of this purity, I promise to keep a chaste distance between us. I will communicate my new, good-guy love for you via Morse code and semaphore flags. I won't so much as look at you or make eye contact until after we're married.

Amish Girl: I won't even touch you until after our third child is born. Good luck figuring that one out!

And somehow this is all also about Jesus. I don't get it.

When I was a freshman in high school, I was a fair baseball player in a body the size of a Monopoly hotel. I knew I was small, and I knew other guys were big, and I turned into a maelstrom of insecurity. I wanted to play high school baseball, but everyone was so much bigger than me. What should I do? Should I go out for the team? It seemed like a no-brainer, since freshman baseball had no cuts. My place on the team was guaranteed. Even if I had shown up with a Three Musketeers bar for a bat, they still would have let me play. Yet I decided not to. In the face of only my imagined future failure, with guaranteed success in front of me, I passed on baseball. I never even tried.

Christianity is that guaranteed spot on the freshman baseball team. Once Christ has taken all my sins on the cross, I'm guaranteed, 100% percent saved from them and any others I will commit. I can't fail at the Christian life because Jesus already did it all. I'm free to follow Christ, regardless of the possibility of failure or stumble. But once saved, Christians love to turn their attention toward trying to perfect themselves, and Satan loves to help them. He drives us deeper into ourselves, away from the active world and into the swamp of self-obsession.

"Tries things" is the expression of that freedom to follow Jesus that this perfectionism opposes. To demonstrate this, Jesus told a parable about 3 workers that were given money to invest while their master left on business. Two of them put their money in play and made a profit. But one servant, frightened over the prospect of losing all the money and disappointing his master, buried it, intending to return it when the master returned.

So who was the only servant to get in trouble? The one who got scared and buried his cash. The point? Stop obsessing about sin, like the purpose of new life in Christ is to stop sinning, which we can't do anyway. Start following Jesus instead. Love others. Give a bunch of money to poor people. Dance in church. Talk to a stranger about Christ. 9 out of 10 times I might fail, and probably 10 out of 10 times we'll sin. But we have to take that risk. We were going to sin anyway, and Christ paid for it and forgave it all. The real sin is to bury the life God gave us because we didn't want to let Him down.

I'm well aware of how lame it is to have a favorite athlete as a 27 year old. It's not dignified. By that age you should have outgrown the impulse to appropriate the success of a pro athlete for yourself, and replaced it with more grown up pursuits, like raising your credit rating or reading Dilbert cartoons. I thought I entered that phase when I stopped wearing a baseball cap backwards. But every time I watch my beloved Fulham play, I'm confronted again with an undeniable truth: I'm a major fan of Clint Dempsey. Why? He tries..... well, you know.

 BENCH**

**- written prior to Coach Wooden's passing in 2010.

I think John Wooden would make a fine pope.

If there wasn't already a pope, and he didn't have to be Catholic, I'm confident John Wooden could step up and fill the role as well as any random Italian cardinal. There's possibility in it- Pope Wooden I has a nice ring. But it probably won't ever happen. The world isn't ready for a pope that issues encyclicals on proper defense of the corner three, or has an intricate knowledge of the full-court press.

That knowledge extended beyond basketball. John Wooden's reputation for wisdom was so great that his legendary center, Bill Walton, wrote Wooden quotes on his children's lunch bags. "Be quick, but don't hurry." "Failing to prepare is preparing to fail." "If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it?" Those bon mots are priceless. He's Confucius crossed with 'Pistol' Pete Maravich. The book of Proverbs with a pick-and-roll diagram in the middle.

This excerpt from his book, Wooden: A Lifetime of Reflections and Observations, On and Off the Court, exemplifies that wisdom.

"I used the bench to teach. When future two-time All American Walter Hazzard came first came to us at UCLA, he had a tendency to get a little fancy. He didn't continue to be fancy because he liked to play. Early on we may have lost a few games because I sat him on the bench for playing too fancy. I tell coaches at coaching clinics 'The greatest ally you have to get things working well and to get the players performing as a team is the bench. Don't be afraid to use it, whether for a star player or anyone else'."

It's hard for me to imagine the bench as a teachable place. When I was on the bench as a youth basketball player, the meaning was clear- either I'd screwed up, or I was hiding out from screwing up again.

This dichotomy within the game, between "play" and" bench", eventually made its way into my real life as well. The bench became a comfortable place for me. I kept away from the action of the world where I might mess things up or be punished, but stayed close enough to watch, safe from any possible hurt. It was not a fun place to be, but I was convinced I belonged there, and that God wanted me there.

But Wooden sees the bench differently. It has two elements- 1) the teaching, and 2) its temporary nature. For John Wooden, the bench is a place of teaching, not of punishment. It's where instruction occurs, with the end of bettering the player in mind. Wooden sat Walt Hazzard for a specific purpose- to get him to stop showcasing how great he was and to start him playing in a way that helped the team win. It's a constructive move. Notice also that the place on the bench is temporary. Walt Hazzard didn't stay there, forever exiled from a place on the court; he returned to become a two-time All-American. The idea of the bench, for Wooden, is to get the player back into the game action. The bench is a temporary place.

The Christian word for this process is repentance. Too often the word "repent" is taught with religiosity at the core of it, and it's heard in the same way I once felt about the bench. Repent- you're a failure, you're doing it all wrong; get out of the game, you'll never do it right; sit down because you're getting in everyone else's way, and you should feel bad about it. You're benched.

But repentance is really more like how John Wooden sees the bench. We only need to look at how Jesus treats Peter to see it in action. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus consistently teaches Peter, even though it seems like on every other page Peter or one of the other disciples gets it wrong. Yet, Jesus never lets Peter off the hook. When he's out of line, Jesus says so and corrects him. But he doesn't leave Peter on the bench either. When Peter falls beneath the waves after trying to walk on water, Jesus pulls him back up and into the boat. When Peter denies Jesus 3 times, Jesus reinstates him as the leader of the disciples. Jesus won't let Peter run from following him because Peter thinks he can't do it, or because he's more comfortable on the sidelines. Jesus intends for Peter to be one thing- a player. And, as Utah's state motto says, 'players gotta play'. They can't learn by hiding from the game.

God intends the same for us. He is not content with us to be spectators, or benchwarmers. He intends for us to be players in the game, part of the action of His redeeming story for the world. And so this process of repentance- going to the bench, taking a moment for instruction, and then checking back in- goes on countless times in a day, every day, for the rest of our lives. This is the manner by which we learn to play, to really live. Repent- come here, was that the right thing? What's the way I've taught you? You have what it takes, now get back in there. It's the essence of why Jesus went to the cross for us. By grace I have an infinite number of these chances to come to God, to be coached. And by God's goodness I have a role to play, a reason to be in the game and not in the stands.

It's wisdom from Pope Wooden, who taught with the bench.

 DRAFT

Mel Kiper Jr. is the smartest man in existence.

I can say this for a fact. I don't know his SAT scores, I don't know where he went to college, I don't even know how long it takes him to make instant coffee or decide which pair of socks make the best hand-puppets, but I know he's smarter than any other person alive. This is because Mel Kiper Jr. is an NFL draft analyst. His job is to watch as many college football games as possible, decide which players will make the best NFL players, and then go on TV once a year and analyze the NFL draft. That sentence speaks for itself. Forget about Stephen Hawking or Louis Pasteur- Mel Kiper Jr. INVENTED a job that involves college and NFL football, being on TV, and guessing. That's pretty smart.

It's harsh to call what NFL draft analysts like Mel Kiper do 'guessing'. The process of evaluating collegiate football players for their NFL potential is actually scientific enough for an episode of Star Trek. Height and weight measurements are only the tip of the iceberg. There's also the 40 yard dash, the shuttle run, and the bench press. There's even an IQ test called the Wonderlic, which sounds like a superhero dog performing general hygiene.

For quarterbacks, the evaluation process is even more intense. Men with Nobel Prizes and Ph.D's in astrophysics analyze every snap a quarterback has ever taken and say things like "his release mechanics need work", "footwork is very robotic", and "arm angle is too mandibular on deep throws. does not drive the ball with his core." Nothing is left to chance. Everything about every player, it is assumed, can be broken down to its basic components and scrutinized.

However, there's one phrase that pops up again and again in this laboratory endeavor, particularly with quarterbacks, that is the exact opposite of rational: "He has that 'it' factor."

'It' is that special quality, what the French call je ne sais quoi (literally, "I hope the Bengals draft him") that causes someone to stand out from the crowd in a positive way, like charisma, or confidence or joy. Whatever 'it' is, it's not scientific. It can't be tested or quantified. No athlete can be said to have "2.7 on the It Scale." For a data-driven enterprise like draft analysis, allowing something quasi-mystical like "It" into the discussion seems out of character. And yet, it comes up more often than not, in response to the question 'How do we know he'll be a good player? Answer: he has 'it'.

Young athletes don't corner the market on the ownership of 'it'. Politicians, businessmen, communicators, musicians, even ordinary people can also be said to have 'it'. It's an appellation that basically says 'You have some ethereal, non-understandable thing happening'. It's borderline religious. How convenient, then, that this quasi-religious quality known as 'it' has a genuinely religious, Christian twin: love.

1 Corinthians 13 is such a famous passage on love that it's read at 80% of all weddings and probably should have been read at the other 20%. It's so well known that even the guys in 'Wedding Crashers' knew about it. Check out what the apostle Paul writes in that chapter about the prominence of love in a Christian's life.

"If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing."

Some in the Corinthian church were obsessed with having special abilities and showing off, like speaking in tongues. But Paul is having none of it. Being a spiritual dynamo is awesome, guys. Knowing everything about the Bible- heck, everything, period- is great too. You can obey Christ until you're blue in the face, giving away everything and even dying for Him. But if you don't love, who cares? You didn't do anything.

Paul tells us that the defining characteristic of a Christian is love. Do people notice our obedient life? Great! Do they notice the Jesus fishes on our cars? Right on! Do they notice our rock-solid faith in the midst of crisis and trouble? Sensational! But, above all, do people notice that we love others? Uh oh.

Love is tricky because it's an attitude, or posture, not a mushy feeling. Love comes to us in the truth of Jesus, his life and crucifixion. 1 John 4:10 says, "this is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us, and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins." We don't know what love looks like without the cross, and we can't love others until we've admitted the truth of our need of a Savior. And why would we? Why would we love people we dislike unless we knew that we had had a shared, desperate need of salvation? Without Christ, we're good people and others are bad people. But with the truth of Christ, we're all bad, and all died for, and so all loved. That's the truth that love for others comes from.

Lots of times in my life people see many other characteristics before they see love. In fact, I think sometimes love is about 49th on the list, between "where are the hubcaps on his car?" and "he seems to only own one pair of pants." That's a tough scouting report to hear. More often than not, I would rather the world saw the more traditional definition of 'it', anyway- big success, tons of respect, people giving me props and thinking I'm great. Loving everybody? Not on my radar. But Paul says without it, I'm not much more than a ring tone. My love-less life is just a bunch of radio static.

Ultimately, what people see in us is love. Imagine if Mel Kiper, Jr. evaluated people for the Christian Draft. "This guy's got everything you could ask for in a believer. His daily quiet times are off the charts, his tithing looks great, the length of his prayers is outstanding, and his durability is unquestioned- never missed a day of church. He also does the little things, with multiple mission trips on his resume. He looks great on film, and there's nothing on the surface that would prevent him from being a stud at the next level. The only thing that coaches question is the intangibles, because that's the deciding criteria. Does he love people? Does he have that 'it' factor?"

 BROADCASTING

Most communications majors are sculptors at heart.

Sculptors look at a slab of marble and, in expressing the depths of the human soul, remove whatever does not resemble an ashtray that can sell for $2.7 million. So, too, do most communications majors look at a college education and chip away anything that does not look like something insanely, insanely easy.

Also like sculptors, we're mostly interested in essences. To us, school is a philosophical undertaking- "If I strip the college experience of its inessential elements," we say, "such as grades, class attendance and sometimes bathing regularly, what would I discover at its pulsing core?" Most discover the essence of collegiate life revolves around Tecmo Bowl and Mountain Dew. Others discover that essence revolves around flunking out. Not everyone can be Michelangelo.

During my junior year of college someone deep in the recesses of the Communications department decided to offer a class called Sports Broadcasting. This was a left field development, if ever there was one. Most of the classes that were typically offered had names like 'Parenthetical Communication Seminar II' and 'Advanced Dynamic Microphonics', the kinds of class names chosen by the Committee for Keeping Textbook Prices in Triple Digits.

At the time I was still weaving in and out of the major like a panicked field mouse, dodging tough-sounding classes like barn owls in the night. 'Sports Broadcasting'? This was a gift. It was delicious manna from heaven. A clear message from God that he loved me and wanted me to continue to sleep until noon, eat breadsticks all day and never graduate.

The instructor of the class was the play-by-play man for a semi-pro basketball team in Fort Wayne, who also called the occasional high school game and women's volleyball game. He played us some of his calls and he was actually quite good. The class began with unprecedented levels of awesomeness and anticipation ("We're going to talk about sports? In class? With our voices?"). It ended with us convincing the instructor to let someone play Madden on the 14 foot projector screen while the rest of us called the game, and that this was a totally legitimate use of class time.

Our assignments were to find local Taylor sports, broadcast them into pocket tape recorders, and then hand them in to be critiqued. Most of us ended up calling college basketball games on TV and making editorial comments about the ways that Duke cheated. To my knowledge none of us ever ended up on SportsCenter.

Calling a sporting event is like eating 6 pounds of blueberries- it sounds easy until you actually try it. Broadcasting requires that you keep up a steady stream of words and comments so that people know what's happening- you're calling the game, which means you're using words to paint the picture of the game for the listener. You can't stop- if you stop, nobody knows what's going on, like if Vanna White decided one day on 'Wheel Of Fortune' that she wasn't going to turn over any more letters.

I still remember the terror I felt when I actually turned on the microphone and called a women's basketball game for class. I forgot names. I mixed up players and I mis-identified defenses. I caught myself watching when I was supposed to be talking. Most of all, I spoke with the growing awareness that I was saying the same things over and over again, and it sounded like a Lewis Carroll poem, except I had no other options- it was either nonsense, or dead air.

My inner monologue compounded the helplessness. "How many times will I say 'across the timeline' or 'there's the pick-and-pop'? And did my voice just crack? I sound like an escaped mental patient. Broadcasting is hard! Wait, when was the last time I actually said something? I think it's been awhile. Say something! Perkins for three! No, not to me, you dotard- into the microphone. And out loud! Are you still just thinking this? FOR GOD'S SAKE, SAY SOMETHING OUT LOUD!!"

I once went to Uganda on a short-term missions trip. Our goal was to share the Gospel with people in remote villages and help plant churches. Part of this effort was to train local believers and pastors to do evangelism. The idea was, we as missionaries modeled how to do practical evangelism, and then gradually handed the evangelism effort off to the pastors as our time with them progressed. This process can be slow, or it can happen quickly. In my case, it happened quickly, like, on the very first day.

This was great news from a 'Gospel' perspective, but bad news from a 'me' perspective. Mentally, my mindset going into the trip had been to do a lot of talking. Lots of Andrew doing things and being the focus of the effort. But because of the aptitude that our trainees showed in presenting the Gospel message, I had to adjust my expectations. I was not going to be talking, but training, helping, and watching. Lots of watching.

Which brings me to Habakkuk. Habakkuk is a book of the Bible that doesn't get a ton of foot traffic. It belongs to a class of books known as the Minor Prophets, or "Guys With Names That Sound Like A Mongoose Choking On A Racquetball", which is how they're known in seminary. You can dump out a box of Alpha-Bits and form one of their names with the first twelve pieces that you pick up. But the name aside, I really like Habakkuk. It's basically 'Job for Dummies.' If you want to read something about questioning the motives of God, but don't want to saddle up to scale the Mt. Everest that is Job, reach for Habakkuk instead- only 3 chapters! If Job is 'War and Peace', Habakkuk is Archie Comics #1. It's great.

In the book, Habakkuk lodges a complaint against God, questioning the methods God is using to discipline the nation of Israel. Habakkuk 1:5 records God's response to Habakkuk, saying this:

"Look at the nations and watch-and be utterly amazed. For I am going to do something in your days that you would not even believe, even if you were told."

Broadcasting is how I thought I needed to be in Uganda. Broadcasting means always talking, always commenting, always being in the thick of the action. I was there as a missionary, so naturally I was going to be at the forefront, right? Naturally I would be working, doing, keeping up a never-ending stream of activity and words and working, right? After all, I thought, that's what I was there for- to do things.

Imagine my surprise when the exact opposite happened. God basically told me what he told Habakkuk- just sit down and watch what I do, and be blown away. Watch as these pastors share the Gospel well, watch as people turn their lives towards Me, watch as I build a brand new church community in only four days. Watch.

This is not an uncommon mindset for us as Christians. Sometimes we think that, in order for the Christian life to work, our activity level needs to stay high. Do this. Go here. Tithe that. Pray without ceasing. Stay active. None of those things are bad, but sometimes over a long period of time, a message develops that says "This whole thing revolves around me." That kind of life is tangentially related to God- I'm doing God actions, saying God words all the time- but God Himself is actually not really involved. It becomes about what I do, and not what God is doing that I'm a part of. God sort of gets ushered out the door while I busy myself with the broadcast.

How nice that God occasionally interrupts our regularly scheduled programming with this breaking news: turn down the volume. The chatter on the broadcast of our lives- moral busyness, righteous activity, constant religious motion- puts a heavy burden on us and sometimes drowns out the things that God is actually doing.

In those moments, He sometimes tells us to take a deep breath and stop- full stop, stop everything- grab a seat, and just be a spectator as He works.

 PHENOM

As a 7 year old I was so good at baseball I think I fooled my dad into thinking I might one day go pro.

Granted, it was machine-pitch baseball at that age, and there's only so much stock you can put in gaudy stats when several of the other players have their gloves on the wrong hand and the center fielder is crying because he has separation anxiety. Still, I stand by what I said: as a 7 year old baseball player, I was the total package. A 5-tool player, as the scouts say. The consensus no. 1 pick in any '9 and under, "I Have To Play This Because Mom Says Lacrosse Is Too Dangerous" Fantasy Baseball League.'

I was a budding superstar, destined for big league glory, with just one minor problem- I peaked at 7. That was as good as I ever got.

The other kids got better after that year, and bigger. I did not- I was eventually viewable from 30 feet away only if you had the Hubble telescope handy. Other kids bought super-advanced TPX baseball bats that were the equivalent of strapping a rocket launcher into batting gloves. They went to prestigious baseball camps led by guys with perfect baseball names like "Keith Bambruiso" and "Lew 'the Ostrich' Palmer". Meanwhile, I played wiffle ball in the neighborhood, unaware that my status as a 7 year old legend was under siege. I never had a chance. I turned 8, and then 9, and then 10, and became progressively less dominant with each passing year. By 13 years old, my days as a phenom were done. Past tense. No more dreams of Wrigley Field glory. I think Dad took it pretty well.

By contrast, Bryce Harper currently is a phenom. Just ask Sports Illustrated, which recently put Harper on their cover**. Harper is a 17 year-old catcher who is also the presumptive number 1 draft pick of the Washington Nationals in the upcoming pro baseball draft. He hits 500 foot home runs, guns out base-stealers, and owns a .600 batting average. He was so bored of high school baseball that he got his GED so that he could play in junior college as a 16 year old. Scouts embarrass themselves talking about him. Many agree that he is more talented than Ken Griffey, Jr. and Alex Rodriguez were at that same age. When he is drafted, he will likely sign a contract for more money than any rookie in history. This means that as a 17 year old, Bryce Harper is so good right now that he will pocket close to 10 million dollars cash before ever playing an inning of pro baseball. He's a phenom.

**- June 8th, 2009. Did you feel the mountains tremble?

By practically anyone's standards, Bryce Harper is having a better life than I am. He's better at his career, stands to earn more doing it, and has received greater recognition than I ever will. It's a no-brainer. I am 28 and regular, he is 17 and cosmically gifted. If we were holding a "Do Not Envy Bryce Harper" contest right this second, I would be in second to last place, just ahead of his twin brother Schmice, who is slightly above average at 'Battleship'.

Bryce Harper is a phenom, and I'm not. Our life trajectories are very different, and that upsets me. He's got it all right now, why don't I? Why should I wait? I don't want to be successful sometime in the future, I want to be successful yesterday, with a whole wheelbarrow full of cash. I want the props and accolades to roll off me like gravy over potatoes. I want. I want. Me. Now. Ugh.

Naturally, God doesn't care about any of that. When God promised to make Abraham the father of many nations, he led him out of his homeland, into the wilderness, and left him there for a decade or so before giving him his son, Isaac. God promised David that he would be king of Israel, and then let him live in caves for many years while the original king chased him around trying to kill him. The apostle Paul spent most of his youth trying to kill Christians before a mid-life conversion. Joseph spent the bulk of his adult life in Egypt before God made good on a promise to bless him. I'm noticing a pattern- clearly, for as much as we care about it, God is not too wrapped up in how one life looks compared to everyone else's.

God doesn't promise that everyone's life story will be equally compelling from the world's point of view. Not all pastors become Mark Driscoll, not all evangelists become Billy Graham, and not all 7 year old Little Leaguers become Bryce Harper. When the Bible says that God is the potter and we're the clay, it's not just telling us that God's into stoneware. He has a pattern to conform us to- his son, Jesus- and a part for us in his redemption story for the world, one that may not generate all the hype or heat that the world uses to decide who's valuable and who's not.

The reality is, the international superstar preacher is a lump of clay, just like the itinerant Paraguayan farmer- they're both the same in the eyes of God. With that knowledge we're free to give up our envy that says that God must love some more than others- the more successful, the more sensational, the more attractive- even the more courageous or loving or humble. They're drippy globs on the potter's wheel just like we are, all of us destined for some shape we can't even dream about. This is our one common trait- failures and phenoms alike.

 RUNNING

I hate to run.

I wish I'd known that when I started running a couple of years ago. How was I supposed to know? The models on the cover of Runner's World all had six-packs and huge, goofy smiles like they had just finished riding the tilt-a-whirl at the fair. 'Come run,' they seemed to be saying to me, 'it's better than crack, and less expensive!' This turned out to be a lie- not the crack part (that may also be true) but definitely the 'less expensive' part. I started running, and less than two weeks later was in a specialty running shoe store, buying footwear so scientifically advanced that NASA fires them into outer space, hoping to frighten extra-terrestrials, if not with our advanced shoe technology, than at least our Spartan commitment to physical dominance. The shoe names help with that.

**Store Employee** : Ok, sir, I see you're interested in the Brookzuno Wave-Beaster Annihilation shoe. In addition to the nacelle in the heel that emits a tachyon burst every time your foot strikes the ground, there's also a built-in heart monitor, a BlueTooth link-up to both your iPod and your personal performance tracker, and a sensor that attaches to your nipples and reads your diaphragm to prevent any bladder dilation. That costs $375, with 10% off for how you wandered helplessly through the store for a full hour until I offered to help. We call it the Family Circus discount.

Me: I'd like to pay full price.

So if I'd known that I hate to run, I could have saved myself a good amount of both money and time. It wasn't all a waste, though. At one point I got so thin my pastor mentioned that I might think about eating something once in a while. And I ran two half-marathons in pretty good times, although I mostly remember, not the performances, but the innumerable children that always rocketed past me about five miles into the race, powered solely by Cinnamon Toast Crunch and RockMonster energy drinks. I'm sure the race directors would have tested for performance-enhancing snacks, but I doubt they could have caught them.

It's not even that I don't like to run, per se. I love basketball, soccer, volleyball, football, whatever. If it's a sport, chances are I'll try to play it. I'll scramble around like a balloon with the air going out of it, and love every second. But I don't like just running. Nothing appeals to me about lacing up shoes, hitting the road with some music and racking up some miles. My lungs clench up. I get angry that I'm not moving faster. Boredom sets in. And I'm alone with my thoughts, the primary one of them being, "How much longer do I have to do this before I can stop and go read some 'Calvin and Hobbes'?"

A major consequence of growing up in a church environment is that every good Bible story has been told and heard before. Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, that one pot-luck where everyone's mom brought grilled cheese- these celebrations are sometimes just a little too familiar. But the other day I was leafing through Matthew in Eugene Peterson's paraphrase of the Bible, The Message, and found this part of the Easter story. It's right after Mary Magdalene and the other Mary discover Jesus' empty tomb.

"[The Angel said to them] Now get on your way quickly and tell his disciples, 'He is risen from the dead. He is going on ahead of you to Galilee. You will see him there.' That's the message." The women, deep in wonder and full of joy, lost no time in leaving the tomb.  They ran to tell the disciples. Then Jesus met them, stopping them in their tracks.....They fell to their knees, embraced his feet, and worshiped him." (italics mine)

I wonder what it felt like to be the two Marys that day. I imagine them tearing towards the disciples with reckless abandon, their lungs burning, feet kicking up dust as they raced over the Middle Eastern terrain. They had just seen Jesus alive, and so their feet, which had been as dead as Jesus was, came to life also, crackling with electricity. This was not a Sunday morning jog while listening to their iPods. They weren't trying to keep their target heart rate up or maintain 7:00 splits. These ladies had somewhere to go. They were running.

Like I said, I hate to run. But when I look at what I like to do in sports, clearly it's not as simple as that. Because I do like to run- in fact, I love it. It just has to have a purpose. I need to mark a man, get a ball, execute a play, something, anything that is an external motivator. If you set me on a cross country course and say 'Run!', forget about it. Deuces, peace out. After 2 miles, with any luck, I'll hail a cab and that will be that. But if it's a soccer game and I've got to go get a ball 20 yards ahead of me and beat a guy to do it, it's definitely going to happen.

I'm after that same sensation that the two Mary's had on Easter morning. They were propelled by a vibrant experience of the living God. They saw the empty tomb, heard the angel say 'Go,' and they were off. Their running was directly related to Jesus' resurrection- it gave them purpose, and so their running was free and joyful, no matter how far or hard the journey to Jerusalem was. I'm sure they ran out of breath- the Gospels don't say but I doubt these women looked like Jillian Michaels. And their legs probably got tired too. But I doubt they stopped much. "Jesus is alive!!" they probably kept telling themselves. "It was REAL!"

Too often my soul-running more closely resembles the time I've spent in my expensive running shoes. It's vague, purposeless, and not driven by anything but habit. I'm not careening with 100 volts of God's realness in my spiritual legs. I'm just out for another run. I try to be obedient and on my best behavior, because it's important to have good morals, and to read my Bible and a Christian book every night like a nice boy. But I'm certainly not motivated at all. No wonder I've looked at God sometimes and said How much longer do I have to run for? As long as I'm alive? I'll never make it.

In this way, Easter is a little bit about running. Jesus' resurrection took all of the moments that the Mary's shared with him and framed them in the context of his God-ness. They felt, probably for the first time, the full weight of knowing that they had experienced God- his love, his teaching, his goodness, his realness. And so they ran to tell the others.

God is what turns our 3 mile death jogs into Mary-and-Mary free-for-all's. Without the experiential knowledge of his goodness, we won't last long on the run. We'll get bored or discouraged and wonder why we're even doing it at all. But, like the women on Easter morning discovered, our dead lives and dead feet are no match for the reality of who God is, and who he is for us.

BANDWAGON

Something about shopping turns grown men and women into two year-olds.

This is what I've learned during my retail career at a sports department store chain.** If you want a fully developed human person to shed their maturity like a shirt on fire, put them in a retail shopping situation and watch as toddlerhood takes control.

** rhymes with Mick's Snorting Foods.

It doesn't matter who a person is in real life, either. Forget having a Master's degree, forget being a grandparent, forget being the CEO of something. Department stores are like Las Vegas. People go in with self-respect and dignity, and leave having done at least three things they're ashamed of.

Of course, we're in the Christmas season right now, which affords me a front row seat to view this phenomenon. I'm like one of those undercover videographers for National Geographic. Crouched by the foosball tables and lacrosse shorts, here's what my camera picks up: as customers approach the merchandise, my microphone registers the audible 'click' of their pupils dilating at the speed of light, and I witness that moment when they become Abu in the Cave of Wonders. A preschool impulse hijacks the wheel of their brain: touch everything right now.

Did you buy that product? You didn't? Then why is it torn out of the packaging and thrown on the floor? And what is it doing twenty eight feet away from the aisle it came from? Also: legally, I'm not allowed to accuse you of stealing. But I can say that your backpack was flat when you entered the store, and now it looks like it could ride in the back of Santa's sleigh. We noticed that.

This would make sense if we weren't talking about adults, but about the Youth Of America, whose still-developing tween brains are not yet capable of processing complex inputs like 'Don't touch that.' I personally blame their music, which sounds like R2-D2 being electrocuted, and suggests the inevitability that a Galaga machine will one day make the cover of Rolling Stone.

Still, the majority of retail customers are nice people, especially when they're distracting you while their friends steal batting gloves. These talks are 90% of my customer interaction, but they're my favorites. I love being free from the usual shopper-employee dynamic, the one characterized by demands to know why their 50% off coupon from Hobby Lobby won't also work in our store, as well as my flirtation with the line between 'excellent customer service' and 'kind of lying'. We're just two people shooting the breeze and getting to know each other until the theft is complete. Usually, they just want to talk about why we don't have any Reggie Bush jerseys.

A lot of people have noticed this, that there's nothing but Green Bay apparel in our store. No Reggie Bush jerseys, true, but if you want eight different varieties of Aaron Rodgers gear**, including authentic, game-worn pajamas, you're in luck. The reason for this, of course, is that we're in Wisconsin- and not just 'in Wisconsin', but 'in Wisconsin during a time when the last time the Packers lost was over a calendar year ago'.

**- As a Bears fan, it tortures me that the last time Green Bay had something less than an elite quarterback, I was 10 years old, and the next time I will be at least 40. I think I gave myself a bleeding ulcer just thinking about it.

The downside of this lack of product diversity is that we have to occasionally turn away customers looking for non-Packer merchandise while having whole aisles stocked with Clay Matthews pillow dolls. But the upside is that, by preventing people from buying the jersey of whichever other teams are successful at the moment, we're discouraging bandwagon fans.

Bandwagon fans infuriate us. The normal course of fandom is to choose one team, then live and die with that team until, well, you die yourself. But the bandwagon fan ignores that unspoken rule- they float from successful team to successful team, always arriving just in time for a championship to happen, then disembarking just as that original team's run is losing steam.

Diehard fans can say that they hate bandwagon fans because they're always around for the good times, but never for the bad. It strikes at our basic sense of justice. It feels unfair for someone who just showed up to get the same joy from a winning season as someone who suffered with a team for years. They didn't pay their dues, we think, so why should they be allowed to enjoy the spoils of victory?

But there is a deeper reason why bandwagon fans make us angry: they mock the choice that diehard fans have made. That "one team/one life" thing may be a rule, but it's not an enforceable one. Nobody has to abide by it if they don't want to. Diehards choose to follow it, for better and worse. But if someone does decide to be a bandwagon fan, guess what they get? They get to enjoy the ecstasies of the sports-following life and never the miseries of losing. And it's a life that diehards, by virtue of their choice to be one-team fans, will never experience.

Economists call this phenomenon 'opportunity cost'. Opportunity cost is a concept that describes the relationship between valuable resources and choice. With an opportunity, choosing one thing necessarily excludes something else, or multiple somethings. For example, if a person chooses to become an economist over a TV weatherman, that person's opportunity cost is 'actually having to make an accurate prediction sometimes.'

Another good example is my current home of Madison, WI.** Madison enjoys a somewhat- well deserved reputation for being anti-big business and pro-granola chomping Communism. I say 'well deserved' because, when Starbucks opened a franchise in the local hipster-chic shopping enclave, Madisonites revolted by launching bricks through its front window for eight consecutive days. I say 'somewhat' because those bricks were not fair-trade.

**- Here's why Madison is adorable, aside from the fact that, on the third day I lived here, the local news led with a story about a dog getting caught in a bear trap. My hometown of Louisville, KY has both a population of roughly a million people and a raging, raging inferiority complex. By contrast, Madison-at one fifth that size- has a massive God complex. No town in America has such a disproportionate understanding of their place on the national radar. Example- Time magazine recently wrote a cover story about protesting, didn't mention Madison once- and Madison was pissed. Coming here from Louisville was like breaking up with Jan Brady and then buying season tickets to Notre Dame football.

But my point is that Madison's reaction to Starbucks perfectly illustrates, albeit with organic crayons and rainforest-free pencils, the way that opportunity cost works. Madison reacted in anger because they know that buying a latte from Starbucks is mutually exclusive to buying from a local vendor. That transaction ain't coming back. It's lost, gone. One more steal for corporate America.

On a purely economic level, opportunity cost may not fire our imagination. But philosophically, this idea of mutual exclusivity has relevance for us. In our lives, we're very aware that, in choosing to do Option X over Option Y, we lose the opportunity to pursue Option Y. Sometimes we can make peace with this dynamic. We're ok with the choices we've made and the life paths they've left behind. The worst we can say is that maybe we chose the wrong sports team, or, in the city of Cleveland's case, the wrong teams chose them.

But sometimes that peace evaporates. In those moments, the lostness of those left-behind lives weighs on us. The career we wanted and lost touch with. That relationship we should have chased. The big move that we never took. The conversation that never happened. In those moments, we feel the rumbling of opportunity cost in our heart, like a train barreling past our station, headed for the opposite direction our ticket is stamped for.

Our go-to Bible story for opportunity cost is Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. It's not the easiest text to understand- after finishing his book Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard actually invented Existentialism just to think about something less confusing. And it's a favorite of preachers everywhere looking to score some easy guilt points ("Do you love anything more than the Lord? ANYTHING?" etc.)

In the story, God tests Abraham's faith by asking him to make Isaac, Abraham's son, a burnt offering to Him. Abraham obliges and takes Isaac on the three day journey to Mount Moriah. It begins this way:

..."Abraham!" God called.

"Yes," he replied. "Here I am."

"Take your son, your only son- yes, Isaac, whom you love so much- and go to the land of Moriah. Go and sacrifice him as a burnt offering on one of the mountains, which I will show you." (Gen 22:2, italics mine)

From the beginning, it's clear that God wants Abraham thinking about opportunity cost. He doesn't reassure Abraham by saying, "Take your son- remember, the one through whom I promised to give you many descendents, and whose birth happened against incredible odds, just like I said it would."

Instead, he tells Abraham this: "Take your son... your only son- yes, Isaac, who you love so much."

It's a loaded sentence. God emphasizes both Isaac's economic scarcity ("only"son) and his identity ("Yes, Isaac...", using his name to reinforce for Abraham the stakes of the decision- Abraham will lose his joy, his 'laughter').

He says those words not to Abraham the mega-saint, but Abraham the man- the man who once impregnated his servant and twice pretended that his wife was his sister, in both cases because he didn't believe God would keep His promise to give Abraham a son and prosper that son's offspring.

And God tells Abraham this, not at the top of the mountain, but at the bottom- before the trip started, even. Hiking is a great pastime, if a bit pricey- budget-conscious hobbyists often choose a pursuit with less expensive gear, like amateur space flight- and it's so much fun that our Native American friends sometimes hiked for years at a time, and without North Face jackets.

One of hiking's absolute truths is this: Mountains take awhile to climb. Expertise can't change that. It doesn't matter if you've done the John Muir Trail from start to finish, or just the Tailgate Trail from cornhole board to beer pong table. Either this is 2480 A.D and you're teleporting, or you're walking up there.

I mention all that as a counterweight. Because Abraham is in the Faith Hall of Fame, we sometimes gloss over this part of the story. We assume that the journey was some kind of quick jaunt up a stained glass road towards Abraham's beatification. But we would do well to remember that Abraham was also a man like us, and the road up the mountain lasted for three days.

And so, as Abraham climbed, God's words echoed in the amphitheatre of his mind, morning and night sounding against parts of Abraham both faithful and faithless up to the very moment he drew the knife. Perhaps like this:

"The next morning Abraham got up early." (v. 3)

Take Isaac up the mountain, Abraham.

"...he chopped wood for a fire for a burnt offering and set out..." (v. 3)

Isaac, whose name is the laughter in your life.

"So Abraham placed the wood for the burnt offering on Isaac's shoulders, while he himself carried the fire and the knife." (v. 6)

Isaac, the irreplaceable. The unique.

"...the boy said, '[W]here is the sheep for the burnt offering?'"(v. 7)

The child you waited your whole life for.

"'God will provide a sheep for the burnt offering, my son' Abraham answered." (v. *)

Your greatest treasure, Abraham.

"Then he tied his son, Isaac, and laid him on the altar on top of the wood." (v. 9)

The thing you love most in this world, Abraham.

"And Abraham picked up the knife..." (v. 10)

The only one. Your son.

At the decisive moment, the Lord's angel steps in and halts the proceedings. Abraham's attention is drawn to a thicket where a ram is caught in the brambles. God has provided a sacrifice in Isaac's place. Abraham's faith is rewarded. Isaac is saved.

Because we feel opportunity cost so deeply, it makes sense that we would want to understand God's relationship to our choices. That desire goes far beyond the academic tedium of the "sovereignty vs. freedom" debate. It comes from further inside, from the place of knowing that our decisions have sometimes ruled out opportunities we dearly wish they had not, and wanting to know what God does with them.

God redeems Abraham's choice to kill Isaac by trapping a ram in the thicket on Mt. Moriah- that famous ram which foreshadows Jesus' future atoning death. It's interesting to note how God respects Abraham's freedom in the encounter. He doesn't roll back events just when Abraham goes to plunge the dagger, saying "I just wanted to make sure you would actually do it! You're good!" Instead, God enters into the scene as it is playing out, stops it, and then provides the means to change the story.

Improvisational theatre is guided by the principle of 'Yes, and'. When working together, improv actors never say 'no' to another actor's contribution. Instead, they are trained to say 'yes' to the idea (by accepting the new premise into the scene), and to react to it with an idea of their own. With 'Yes, and' as a safety net, entire shows can build from the knowledge that, no matter what idea is proposed, fellow performers will always accept it and build on it.

Opportunity cost is the language of our panicked realization that our choices have consequences, sometimes permanent ones. But "Yes, and" is the language of God's redemptive relationship to those choices. Jesus is God's greatest redemptive "and". When sin entered the world through Adam and Eve's decision, God said both "Yes"- not approving of the choice, but accepting it- then "and", introducing Jesus to the stage. "Yes, and". The opportunity cost of saying yes to sin- permanent separation from God- is paid by God's dramatic addition. We can have two mutually exclusive choices after all. Redemption.

That redemptive stance is part of God's identity- as applicable to our little lives as it is to the whole world. As with Abraham, God allows our lives to happen as we choose, saying "Yes" to them- but also "and". That "and" is His redemptive addition to the scenes of our life, a ram-in-the-thicket to all of us that shows us that our choices are not beyond either His power or interest. "I will repay the years that the locusts have eaten..." (Joel 2:25)

With Abraham and Isaac, God tipped his hand that He is a bandwagon kind of God- so steadfast in his love for us that He would let us have our choices, but also them as well. Unless we choose to follow Cleveland sports, that is. Those guys are screwed.

PIZZA TEAM

The third most disappointing thing about working at Pizza Hut was that I never got to hand-toss the dough.

The most disappointing thing was delivering pizza to finance a semester of graduate school while knowing, deep-down, that there wasn't going to be a second one. The second most disappointing thing was getting robbed during my very first day working there. That experience taught me a few things, namely that if a group of shady-looking guys waves you over and tells you it's their order, it's not racist to verify that fact before giving it to them. Also, always collect the money before handing over the pizza. ALSO, if you get punched in the head, always run away at maximum speed, not 50%, because even though you think the guy won't chase you all the way to your car and drop kick your window as you peel out while wetting yourself omni-directionally like a lawn sprinkler, he will.

But the third most disappointing thing was that I couldn't hand-toss the dough. I hope that I'm not violating any trade secret laws** by revealing that Pizza Hut's dough, at the restaurant level at least, is as frozen as Ted Williams' head. It has the same consistency as a pre-toasted Eggo waffle. Any attempt at hand-tossing their dough involves a) spinning a sheet of bread into the air, and then b) applying medical attention to your broken hand after the dough clanks into your wrist like a manhole cover.

**- if I am, I would like to cite attorney-client privilege on the grounds that someone reading this, somewhere, is F. Lee Bailey.

I have always wanted to toss pizza dough. I don't know why. Maybe it's the way it combines both absurdity and elegance. The dough is misshapen and wobbly as it spins, and as it's caught it spills over the hands, like the pizza-maker suddenly caught some motor oil. But in the hands of a good practitioner of dough-tossing, it also has smoothness, like someone practicing tai chi. No energy is wasted as the dough transfers from hand to air, and as ludicrous as it seems in the details, on the whole, the process is mesmerizing. I could probably watch it for hours.

So imagine my delight when Google revealed the existence of a group known as the U.S. Pizza Team. They compete worldwide at pizza dough tossing, including in the World Championships in Salsomaggiore, Italy. There are events like 'largest dough stretch', 'fastest pizza-maker', and 'free-style dough acrobatics'. And as if the event names aren't impressive enough, the U.S. Pizza Team has won multiple medals at pizza-making competitions around the globe. These guys are like the progeny of a marriage between an Olympic gymnast and Little Caesar. They spin pizza like I flip television channels. They manipulate the dough like a Wall Street banker. And they travel the globe using pizza to win glory, honor, and the hearts of women who love the smell of tomato sauce. This is a good life. Competitive pizza tossing? No guidance counselor ever told me this was an option.

But the more I thought about it, the more confused I got. How'd pizza-tossing get turned into something competitive? Who decided what the criteria for most delicious pizza were? I can picture some judge saying "Oh, the dough only went 2 feet in the air on that throw....poor rotation from side to side, and the symmetry was lacking, there was a lot of wobbling.... not strong on the catch either, I like to see you controlling the dough earlier...4.5 out of 10." It reminds me of Robin Williams in 'Dead Poets Society', ripping pages out of books and yelling about how you can't grade poetry. I feel the same way about pizza dough.

Wanting to quantify things is in our human nature. We just don't do very well with gray areas. We want to know who's the best and what's the most. And if something doesn't have a score attached to it, we'll find a way to set up some rules and go grade it anyway. So it's only natural that something like pizza-tossing, that's clearly more of an art, would eventually find its way into the competitive arena. We can't help ourselves. I'm pretty sure the first time Leonardo da Vinci showed the Mona Lisa to somebody, they turned to him and said, "This is great, Leo. Can you do twenty of them in an hour? That's the world record right now."

It's also part of the reason why a little bit of me sometimes wants to cut the Pharisees some slack. Of course, in the story of Jesus, they're sort of the villains. Jesus consistently yells at them for their legalism and hard-heartedness. They get mad at him and start trying to trap him. Eventually some of them plot his death and succeed at it. In terms of likability, they're not exactly the Mighty Ducks.

Instead of walking individually with God, they took their rules and turned them into a contest.  Who's the most observant? Who's the most righteous? Let's check all the rules and then we'll see. And when they found somebody not living up to their standards, the Pharisees made them feel like failures- all because they weren't as good at following the Law. I do this all the time. Instead of cherishing my freedom, I take my life of faith and make it a competition instead. Am I giving to the poor? Check. Reading my Bible every day? Check. Trying to witness? Check. And what happens next? This thought- "Well, I'm doing everything right, it looks like. I must be winning." In a nutshell, I'm entering my faith in the World Jesus-Following Championships. Yuck. The Pharisees and I, we're world class Pizza Teamers.

There's no winning in the life of faith, at least not as we understand winning to look like. You can't set up parameters and hurdles and then pat yourself on the back for clearing them, all the while looking at the poor suckers behind you who aren't doing as well.

The Pharisees thought they had it made- they had all the rules memorized, dedicated their whole lives to obeying them, and had gained prominence in the community because, in the game of faith, they were the champions. And then Jesus shows up and obliterates the whole thing. He called them white-washed tombs, with nothing on the inside but death, and announced that they'd missed the point of faith entirely. Obedience comes secondary to the heart, and so they could go on getting 10.0′s on all their scorecards, because God didn't care. All their events, all their performances, turned out not to be important at all.

If I ever get on stage with some dough in my hand, I will embarrass myself and, because of YouTube, likely embarrass several future generations as well. I would probably get a cease-and-desist order from the World Pizza Headquarters. But the U.S. Pizza Team has shown me the light. Because pizza-tossing and Jesus have this in common- no grades, no scores, no winners.

 JERSEY

I'm that guy with the intramural championship t-shirt.

You know the guy. It's your company softball game, and everyone is wearing the team uniform- except for him. It's your casual dinner party, the one for which you selected the trendiest guest list and the most tasteful indie rock background music, and he's wearing it as the T-shirt in his "blazer and T-shirt" combo. Or it's your wedding, and you stumble over the 'I do' part because you can read the letters Intra and ...pions 2004 underneath his white shirt and tux. Wherever you see him, he's either already wearing that shirt or looking for an excuse to pull it on. He won something once, and he's not about to let you forget it. That guy. I'm that guy.

I'm sure my friends wish they could change history, but they can't. It's fact: I won an intramural championship in college, and I have the shirt to prove it. Years later, that t-shirt is the bedrock of my wardrobe. It is the lone constant in my sartorial repertoire, and I'm always hunting for reasons to wear it. Pick-up basketball? Of course I'm playing, check the shirt I'm wearing. Returning a faulty belt-sander at Home Depot? Maybe you'll refund my money once you realize that I'm a winner! Delivering a baby in a taxi-cab? Ma'am, I know that your contractions are ten seconds apart, but can we stop at my house so I can put on my victory gear? I'm shameless. I'll take any opportunity available. I love to wear jerseys.

I have other jerseys, but I rarely wear them. My Sammy Sosa jersey started as a size medium, but from the years 1996-1999 it mysteriously grew three sizes. My Brian Urlacher jersey is even bigger; it looks like someone peeled it off Andre the Giant. I can't wear either one out in public without feeling like Subway Jared wearing his pre-weight loss clothes. And so I usually don't.

But I think the reasons why I don't wear the other two jerseys run deeper than just indignation or sizing. On some level, I wonder what I'm actually saying when I pull on a shirt that has another, more prominent man's name on it. Some might say that I just want to feel like more of a part of the team I support. They would say that a team is bigger than just the players, coaches, management, owners- that it also encompasses supporters, fans, the city, and that by putting on the jersey when I watch the team play or when I'm walking around, I'm just entering into that community of fans in a more direct way. That sounds like it's correct on some level- I can buy that.

Yet, I also don't buy that. See, Sammy Sosa would never wear an Andrew Larson jersey as he relaxed aboard his yacht. Brian Urlacher would never be spotted rocking Andrew Larson gear while lounging around the house. Why not? Yes, I know that they don't own those jerseys, don't know me, and that I'm not the same nationwide symbol that the Cubs or Bears are, though not for lack of effort on my part. But still, if they did have jerseys like that, and did know me, I doubt those two would get as much mileage out of wearing a 'me' jersey as I would out of one of theirs. Why?

It's probably as simple as this: they don't want to be me. Those guys would not get nearly as much joy out of associating themselves with my life as I probably do when I associate mine with theirs. See, when I pull on an Urlacher or Sosa jersey, what I'm really doing is trading. I'm disengaging from my life and engaging in theirs. On a different level, the same thing is happening when I wear the intramural championship t-shirt. I'm dissociating from the regular, day-to-day person I am now, and I'm associating with the exciting, cornerback-on-a-championship-flag-football-team-at-a-small-Christian-college-in-rural-Indiana life I was in earlier. Sounds ridiculous, right? But it's true. I even live vicariously through myself.

There's no shame in admitting that we're periodically bored, restless, uneasy with the places we occupy in life right now. That's a universal human feeling. In those moments, we don't have to travel very far to find another person, another movement, or another fad to associate ourselves with so that feeling will go away. It's an easy bit of spiritual arithmetic- I feel like a loser, you look like a winner. A+B= now I'm not a loser anymore, because I'm with you.

So now the question is, how can we move past this inferiority while also being honest about the reality we see? Because, if we're honest, even if we really lather on the self-esteem hokum and affirming mantras, deep down we still know the truth- those guys ARE leading better lives, at least from the outside looking in. Their genetics are better, their jobs are cooler, and they will never lack money or respect or notoriety or companionship, unless they choose to forgo them. We can't pretend we don't want that, or we're liars, and we know it.

The honesty comes when I admit to myself that I'm a jersey wearer of the highest order- I always have been, and probably always will be. For me it's athletes; for you it may be a celebrity, or a music group, a political party, a product, or a lifestyle. It can be anything.

The apostle Paul talks about this phenomenon in Romans 4, when he talks about God crediting salvation to Abraham on the basis of his faith alone. The technical term for this is 'imputed righteousness', but we might as well call it the Doctrine of Jersey-Wearing.

When we profess faith in Christ, God immediately declares us 'not guilty' for our sins and credits (imputes) Jesus' perfection to us. In Galatians, Paul says that we "put on Christ", as in, we wear His righteousness, like a cloak- or a jersey. Or, as the prophet Isaiah says, "(God) has clothed me with the garments of salvation, He has covered me with the robes of righteousness." That sounds like a heck of a uniform.

God knows about the jerseys we wear. He sees us trying to associate ourselves with anybody or anything that will allow us to feel like winners. And his plan for salvation takes that into account. He asks us, not to give up our jersey-wearing tendencies, but to wear the only one that will actually do what we want. Athletes grow old, celebrities come and go, causes disappoint us, and all the while we spend our whole lives trading team shirt after team shirt into our wardrobe, dressing ourselves up in the lives we secretly wish we had, dying a little inside each time as we wonder "Why them and not us?" But the jersey of Jesus always allows us to be perfect in the eyes of the Lord, affiliated with a life of grace, purpose, and meaning.

I may love my intramural championship t-shirt because it's the equivalent of walking around with my own Wheaties box strapped to my chest, but it's still just a shirt. Jesus does better. He rescues us from that jersey-wearing cycle and gives us the thing we really want- freedom to be honest about ourselves, and who we actually are inside.

MARAVICH

When I get to heaven, the thing I can't wait to do is sing.

I'm already making plans for what to do with those pitch perfect nine-octave pipes that I'll use for eternity. I'm going to form a barber-shop quartet and rotate between bass, tenor, and beat-boxing. I'll follow behind people on the streets of gold and just Auto-Tune their everyday conversation with my voice. Occasionally I'll praise the Lord, although I'm not sure how the angelic choir will handle a vibrato-obsessed maniac drowning out the other harmonies and making up hand motions for every song. It's a good thing heaven will be infinitely large, because for some people paradise is hammocks, lemonade and not listening to a human karaoke machine 24/forever, so we'll need that space, and then some.

This desire isn't hard to trace. I used to have an incredible singing voice. At least I think I did. Memory may have distorted it, but I remember it as a kind of 'Disney animated character' pre-teen soprano in the mold of Fievel, Aladdin, or Tevin Campbell. It was a grade school weapon of melody in a "That thing's operational!" kind of way. Or so I recall.

Naturally, I ruined that voice in adolescence by forcing it to sound like whatever growly anger music that I used as an outlet for the rage that only competing in high school forensics can foment. So now my singing voice has a Tom Waits/Wilhelm scream thing happening, like a handful of marbles spinning in a blender, or a choking scare. Goodbye, high notes. I miss you the most when we sing the national anthem.

I blame my degraded singing on abuse because I highly doubt it was my voice changing during puberty. I didn't even notice puberty. I gave up waiting for it to happen, like a kid falling asleep while watching for Santa Claus, and only realized it was done after college, when I suddenly grew muscles and could back a car into a parking space. For most people I knew, puberty was like a grenade- it struck without warning and made them look deformed. But for me, puberty** was more like a Middle East peace treaty, in the sense that it lasted for about 10 years and, when it was over, not much had changed. I'm pretty sure that included my vocal talent.

**- I solemnly swear never to use this word again.

The other reason why I wish I still sang well is because music has amazing power. Have you ever heard a song whose melody and lyrics just connected with you? Something happens in that moment- it feels like an avalanche happens in your gut, revealing this vast, empty chasm that the music is simultaneously filling and draining out of. When that happens to me, I usually start singing along, because I want to feel like my voice has the power to create that feeling- even though I know that it doesn't.

Pete Maravich was basketball's original boy wonder. As a child Pete mastered his arsenal of trick dribbles and no-look passes, which led to his later reputation for having the premier handle of his era. His acumen as a scorer is borne out by his collegiate scoring average- 44 points per game, in the era before the three point line. In the NBA, that offensive reputation only grew as Pistol Pete won a scoring title with the New Orleans Jazz, and was a first ballot Hall of Famer at the age of 39, one of the youngest ever inductees.

Pete Maravich was, by all outward appearances, a basketball machine. He even described himself in childhood as a "basketball android". But there was a ghost in the shell. Pistol Pete was a restless soul. In his downtime from the being an NBA player, Pete searched for the meaning of life. That quest led him to dabble in UFO-ology, transcendental meditation, veganism, and more, always coming up empty. "My life had no meaning at all, said Maravich. "I found only brief interludes of satisfaction. It was like my whole life had been about my basketball career."

Pete Maravich shares that sentiment with the author of Ecclesiastes. Traditionally attributed to King Solomon, the writer of Ecclesiastes calls himself Qoheleth, meaning 'Teacher' or 'Speaker'. Across 12 punishing chapters, Qoheleth grapples with the apparent meaningless of life, and he's so persuasive that we, the reader, are almost tempted to agree. Nothing- not work, love, pleasure, even wisdom itself- withstands the scrutiny of the Teacher. Yet amidst that hopelessness, Qoheleth writes something that brings focus to both my singing and Pete Maravich.

"He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end." (Ecc. 3:11)

Here in Ecclesiastes, Qoheleth unfurls the existential dynamic that underpins our lives. It's the paradox that C.S. Lewis paraphrased best when he said "Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time." We have eternal desires that are leashed to a world which is temporal and finite.

That natural amphibiousness means that our physical lives form a kind of electrical circuit for our eternal desires. So when Pete Maravich picked up a basketball, the eternity in his heart leapt out and attached itself to that ball. When I try to sing, eternity bubbles from my throat and forms a covalent bond with the notes. Why? Because there's a current of eternity in our hearts- and the voltage needs somewhere to go.

That connective instinct means that the eternity in our hearts is in constant dialogue with the physical world that surrounds it. It converses with work, relationships, and hobbies. It engages anything it can find, be it as trivial as basketball or singing, or as significant as charity work or a spouse. It touches everything, and of everything it touches it asks the same thing: can you support the weight of me?

In Pete Maravich's case, his eternity asked that of basketball, then crushed it. And when it collapsed, it sent Pete into a groping frenzy, reaching out to whatever else he could touch in the world that could hold his eternity instead. Each thing he pursued- UFO's, nutrition, spiritualism- was rendered incoherent by the "beginning to end" that God can fathom, but we cannot.

That "beginning to end" is the context in which our "eternity" resides. That's the banner we ride under. So it makes sense that one of God's names is the Alpha and the Omega- the beginning and end. The only possible conductor for the electric eternity in our hearts is our infinitely large God, and both Qoheleth and Pete Maravich eventually agreed. Qoheleth ended Ecclesiastes by saying the meaning of life is to "Fear God and keep his commandments."; Maravich ultimately became a born again Christian.

My do-re-mi's don't usually live up to my expectations. Do I wish I had a huge Steve Perry wail that could also morph into a vox sensitivo more appropriate for slow jams? Definitely. But if the life of Pete Maravich shows us anything, it's that things like singing and sports are terrible carriers for the eternity God has placed inside each of us.

That's all going to change inside the pearly gates, though. You might want to request some earplugs when you get there.

MAN O' WAR

As a native Kentuckian, I really should know more about horse racing than I actually do.

It's a shame that I was absent on the days where they pulled us all out of school and explained to us about exacta boxes, Beyer speed ratings and mint julep preparation. The Sport of Kings is the lifeblood of the Bluegrass State, right along with tobacco farming and wondering if we're part of the South (Kentucky- "Maybe." The South- "NO!") So I really feel like I'm letting people down by being the Churchill Downs equivalent of a party foul.

But truthfully, I can only apologize to the citizens of the commonwealth: I'm just not great at betting on horse racing. I make a good show of it when I've got the Daily Racing Forum in my hand, but the reality is, I'm picking horses based on which one has the coolest sounding name. What baffles me is, that strategy yields results for secretaries around NCAA tournament time, but backfires spectacularly when I apply it to something as simple as guessing which wild animal can run in a circle the fastest. I like this horse named "Bare Knuckle" since that name sounds Charles Bronson-y, but a horse named "BritchesInStitches" won the last race and I looked like an idiot. I'm glad Pat Day didn't know I'm awful at handicapping when I saw him that time at Starbucks. He might have swung at me with his riding crop. Although he was whipping his Ford Explorer out the window as he drove off, so I'm not sure he's taking retirement well.

But there is one aspect of horse racing that I speak with confidence about: the concept of pedigree. Horse racing, as a sport, is one massive exercise in equine eugenics. Horse owners take their best male horses and mate them with the best female horses, and then hope that the offspring is the genetic Powerball between the two. If that foal is a winner, great! Let's start it training to race and become the next Secretariat. If not? Well, 8 year old girls will always need something to feed apples to. As an analogy, just imagine the U.S. Olympic committee (in an effort to create a track-and field superbaby) forcing Usain Bolt to mate with Jackie Joyner-Kersee. Actually, don't imagine that. Forget I said anything.

Leaving that aside, the process of This Horse mating with That Horse, whose foal then mates with Another Horse (and so on) creates a horse's pedigree, or bloodline. When handicapping a horse's ability to win a race, this is a big deal. Who is its sire (or father)? Its mother? Grandfather? What family tree does it belong to? What racing characteristics run in that family? In a very broad sense, you can tell a lot about a horse just by looking at its pedigree.

Man o' War was one of the great thoroughbreds of all time, particularly in the early era of American horse racing. His primary claim to fame was his stature- at 16 hands tall and weighing over 1000 pounds, Man o' War was a Beowulf-ian nightmare come to life. But he was more than just a mesomorphic physical specimen. The creep could roll, Dude. Man o' War demolished the competition in almost every race he ever entered (20-1 lifetime record), including the Kentucky Derby, and claimed one of the first Triple Crowns in the annals of horse racing.

After his career, Man o' War retired to stud, where he sired 64 stakes winners. His bloodline eventually encompassed a total of 124 stakes winners, including future Triple Crown winner War Admiral, 1926 Horse of the Year winner Crusader, and Seabiscuit's future father Hard Tack. In horse racing circles, Man o' War's is a regal bloodline, and it is one that still exists to this day.

Bloodlines make a difference in our lives too. For most of us, our family pedigree doesn't look anything like Man o' War's. When we look back, we see ordinary parents and regular grandparents, stretching back, ad infinitum, as far as we care to look. Not many of us can say we have royal blood in our veins. Very few can point to the patriarch of our family tree and say, "That right there is who I'm in the line of," with any glow of pride. More often than not, if we find anything at all in our pedigree, it isn't much to brag about. 'Your great- uncle invented a new flavor of yogurt.' 'Your true birth father was Neil Armstrong.....'s favorite car wash owner.' You're telling me that's my ancestry? Yawn. Can I at least get some relatives who were extras on Friday Night Lights?

Contrasting the ennui that our filial history brings, the story of the Prodigal Son tells us something different, something exciting:

"[The] son said to [the father], 'Father, I have sinned against both heaven and you, and I am no longer worthy of being called your son.' But his father said to the servants, 'Quick! Bring the finest robe in the house and put it on him. Get a ring for his finger and sandals for his feet. And kill the calf we have been fattening. We must celebrate with a feast, for this son of mine was dead and has now returned to life. He was lost, but now he is found.'"

After the son realized the depth of his foolishness, he planned to go back to his father, not as a son, but as a hired servant. He assumed that his father could never treat him like a child again, not after the humiliation and disrespect the son showed. He assumed that the things he's done have wiped out his status within the family.

The father's words in the parable are God's words to us: "This son of mine...." The father's embrace is immediate. There is no hesitation, no negotiation or scolding or rebuke. We may feel like our past mistakes, our current spiritual failures, or anything else can disqualify us from claiming our birthright, through Jesus, as God's sons. We are wrong. God meets every attempt to slink back to Him as disgraced servants with the same words: "This son of mine..."

Horses are not our parents. That goes without saying, although for those products of the Kentucky public school system, it's worth repeating. But God is. Our adoption means that the plasma in our veins belongs to the Lord. Imagine the filling of the Holy Spirit as a blood transfusion. Because of it, we belong to the family tree of Abraham, of King David, of Elijah, with its roots in heaven and its branches covering the world.

And so our identity as children of God is an unshakable fact of our lives, a foundation of son-ship that sin and doubt and stumbling and foolishness can never touch. In Christ, the majesty of God's pedigree belongs to us forever. We have, in a sense, been sired by Man o' War. And just like his children, we run as champions.

MICROPHONE

My company just installed new telephones at our cubicles.

The old ones were perfectly fine, of course. They performed every task an employee could ask of a telephone, including the "do-not-disturb" feature, which, when activated, sends a message to other company phones indicating that you cannot be reached. The implication is that you, the employee, are so engrossed in profit-making that any communication could jeopardize the company's very existence, when in fact you were on the Internet researching how to build a prototype jet pack.

These new phones are a major upgrade over the old ones, in that they not only send and receive calls like the older models, but also cost thousands of dollars more to purchase and operate. Their mere existence is a textbook case of "motivated sales professional overwhelms middle manager with Jedi Sales Tricks such as free snacks". This is why my Wildlife Treasury card for 'salesman' ranks them among the most dangerous predators in the animal kingdom. People forget that the Eiffel Tower began as an outhouse until a young girder salesman, working on commission, convinced the Parisian government to build the world's largest bidet.

The phones are also an upgrade because the handset microphone has been improved. The old phones were obviously inferior because, when you called someone, you only heard the voice of the person on the other line. The phone company realized that this was a significant problem. There was so much MORE NOISE in the world, noise that their phones were not providing. This meant that they were not "adding value" and could theoretically "lose market share", after which they might all "be laid off" and have to "become Democrats", which would be unthinkable.

Their solution was to equip the handsets with the same hyper-powerful microphones that nature documentaries use to pick up ambient noise in caves. So whenever you're on the phone, the person on the other end hears, not just your conversation, but the conversations of every other person around you. Now every conference call sounds like an improv comedy audience.

BOSS: Okay, Andrew, let's hear the numbers.

ME: So if you look at the spreadsheet, you can see clearly where delivery performance has suffered in the 3rd quarter...

CO-WORKER: .... and then I told him, listen here pal, do you think you can just waltz in here, after all you did, and think that I'll take you back?

BOSS: Who was that?

ME: Nobody.

CO-WORKER: ... but he kept talking about the mix CD he made for me, and all the Jim Croce songs...

ME: ... we've had trouble securing trucks that accept those pallet sizes, and our inventory turns have been...

BOSS: What?

CO-WORKER: ...and so I said, you can take your ferret and your stupid racquetball trophies, but I'm keeping the waterbed...

BOSS: Can you repeat that last thing you said? I didn't catch it.

ME: ....so I thought it was taken care of, but then they told me the shipment fell off somewhere between Indiana and Oklahoma...

BOSS: I'm picking up extra chatter. Who else is on this call?

CO-WORKER: ...all over town! But there was still one bicycle left. That's how I knew he wasn't going to the movies like he said.

ME: .... got rebar everywhere. And then papayas got in the machines and now every shipment smells like Paulson's ex-wife. That set off his PTSD.

BOSS: Andrew, can you stop breathing into the phone? You sound like you're in an iron lung over there.

Michael Jordan. I can play word association with his name all day. Nike. Gatorade. Bald. Bulls. Dunking. Just Do It. Three-peat. Craig Ehlo. Space Jam. His public ubiquity means that, whether you are a suburban kid from Hackensack, an elderly Siberian woman or an Inuit baby, the name Michael Jordan means something to you.

Another word I associate with Michael Jordan is 'microphone'. This is because my most vivid memory of Michael Jordan is not of any particular basketball play, but of his Hall of Fame induction speech.

Athletes are not generally known for their depth of study into the art of oratory, which means that a standard Hall of Fame induction speech is most notable for its blandness. If Mel Gibson had delivered a Hall induction speech to his soldiers in 'Braveheart', most of them would have taken naps instead of battling for their freedom. This would have crippled Scotland's economy, as replica claymore sales represent a full 1/3rd of all current exports.

But Michael Jordan's Hall of Fame speech was different. On the night of his enshrinement, Real Mike met a live mike. His speech vaporized the celebrity persona of His Airness that that had become such an ingrained part of sports culture. This MJ skipped the platitudes and passed on the thank-you's, and instead called people out from the podium. He made fun of his high school competitors. He called out Isiah Thomas for his alleged 'freeze-out' during the 1985 All Star Game.** He even taunted his sons, apologizing to them for having to live in his shadow and for setting a basketball legacy they would never be able to equal. The narcissism and self-indulgence on display were not pleasing to the eye. In short, he was kind of a tool.

**- Legend has it that a resentful Isiah and Magic Johnson made a pact with other veterans not to pass Jordan the ball during the All-Star Game that year. I have not watched that game, but I can personally guarantee that their shorts were way too tight.

When I first watched this on TV, my astonishment quickly melted into condemnation and self-righteousness. 'What a terrible guy Michael Jordan turned out to be!' I thought. It felt good to know that I was a better person than the greatest basketball player who ever lived. And I thought that way for a long time.

Now I just think about the microphone.

The word 'microphone' is two Greek words jammed together- "mikros", meaning "small", and "phone", meaning "voice". 'Small voice'. Microphones take our small voice and make it a big voice. They take the words we normally speak only to a few people and amplify them so that many more can hear them.

Notice that it wasn't meant to take our big words and make them bigger. People can already hear those. For Michael Jordan, his big words might be six championship rings, McDonald's and Nike commercials, books about his life, charitable donations and, mostly, that million dollar smile.

For me it might be the songs I sing in church, the Bible open on my desk at work, or the children I sponsor with Compassion International. I don't mind if people hear those words- they're the words I want people to hear, because they flatter me. But that's not just what microphones pick up- they pick up small words too.

What if, like Jordan at the Hall of Fame podium, people heard my small words? Heard the way I treated someone just because they weren't interesting or attractive? Or heard the secret storehouses of bitterness and hurt that I keep in my heart? Or heard the laziness I exhibit at my job? Sometimes the small words of my life make me look just as petty, just as self-obsessed, and just as angry as Michael Jordan's did.

Self-righteousness is a quiet thing. It creeps up on us, camouflaged by our daily life spent trying to follow Jesus, and whispers lies to us about how our moral performance makes us really great. It turns up the volume on the feedback that other people's failures produce, and dials down the noise that our own mistakes create. Left behind are people with planks in their eyes that tsk-tsk the dust in someone else's. People who have forgotten what it feels like to have all they've ever done or thought or spoke laid out for the world to see. People who do not remember that Jesus died to mute our microphones.

Thankfully, there are never any real microphones pointed at my life. If there were, people would have a lot of questions, like "You buy Smoothie King how many times a week?" But just knowing microphones exist keeps me from being surprised when small words pop up in strange places, like the Hall Of Fame. There are no saints, as it turns out, just sinners and jump-shooters. Sometimes both.

FREE AGENT

Anytime the Cubs have a spare $50 million in the bank, it's time to put FEMA on alert, because a disaster is coming.

'Disaster' is too negative a word, actually. It implies that hearing the Cubs have cash to spend is like watching a new lottery winner claim their prize, in that all you can do is say the Serenity prayer and hope they don't blow it all on magic lessons and gum. And that's sort of how it feels.

But a more positive outlook views that $50 million like a creative challenge, a chance to defy preconceived notions of what wasteful spending looks like. It's a playground, a romper room of squandering capital where the only rule is imagination. But while the possibilities are endless- and being the Cubs GM means having an empty canvas of botching it to create on and infinite colors of failure to paint with- it doesn't matter. The Cubbies choose the same option every time: the free agent signing.

Free agents are players whose contracts have expired and can now sign with any team that offers them a deal. Cub fans have seen plenty of them over the years, with Wrigley Field sometimes resembling a kind of Ellis Island for free agents, right down to the shared inability to speak English and confusion about what a cutoff man is. In the Cubs defense, some of those free agents have succeeded, such as Dave Kingman, Randy Myers, or Andre Dawson. But most seemed to come from a bizarro version of eHarmony that pairs mediocre athletes to the Cubs using 27 levels of compatibility, including:

* ability to underperform relative to large contract size.

* hypersensitivity to fan criticism

* media-blaming skills

* aggression towards inanimate objects like Gatorade coolers, pitching mounds, the mayor of Chicago, etc.

I imagine that one of the hardest parts of being a free agent is that it is the sports equivalent of the New Kid. When you're the New Kid at school, everything seems brand new. It feela likw the entire school was just created the moment you enrolled ex nihilo. But the reality is that the school was always there. The students predated your presence. The sports teams were playing before you matriculated. The work of learning was happening long before you found your new locker, unless you live in California, in which case they hope to start any day now.

When a free agent joins a new team, it's the same thing. He isn't coming to a place that just started trying to win the moment he arrived. The manager doesn't greet him by saying "I'm really glad you're here. We weren't even trying to win before. In fact, there wasn't even really a team. But now that you're here, we can start!" No, when a free agent suits up, he joins a program that's in progress. Whether carried out skillfully or ineptly, one thing about free agency is 100% certain: the work of winning was happening long before they joined the team.

The book of Joshua also mentions free agency. At its outset, the people of Israel stand at the edge of Canaan, the Promised Land. In obedience to God's command to conquer the nation, Joshua sends spies ahead to scout the city of Jericho. The king of Jericho learns that they have visited the house of a prostitute named Rahab, who protects the spies by lying about their presence. When they are safe, she tells them this:

""I know the Lord has given you this land... We are all afraid of you. Everyone in the land is living in terror. For we have heard how the Lord made a dry path for you through the Red Sea when you left Egypt. And we know what you did to Sihon and Og, the two Amorite kings east of the Jordan River, whose people you completely destroyed. No wonder our hearts have melted in fear! No one has the courage to fight after hearing such things"...

Then the two spies...reported to Joshua all that had happened to them. "The Lord has given us the whole land," they said, "for all the people in the land are terrified of us."" (Josh. 2: 9-11, 23)

Out of Rahab's mouth come the free agency money quotes. "I know the Lord has given you this land." "For we have heard..." "...our hearts have melted in fear." As it turns out, God's work of winning was already underway in her country. He wasn't just limited to riding sidecar with the Israelites, present in their midst but only blessing their immediate actions. Rahab's confession is a reminder that God was also already ahead of them in the place they were going- in this case, Canaan. The Israelites' job was just to show up, learn God's game plan, and plug into it. They were free agents.

I wish someone had explained free agency to me in college. My spam filter ate the email where the university told us that, after graduating, they would actually make people leave campus. The thought honestly never occurred to me. Even up until the very second when the school president handed me my degree, it never crossed my mind that I would then be forced to pack my belongings and exit, stage Real World.

So after I graduated, I did nothing. And when I say that, I don't mean it in the sense of, "bounced from job to job, backpacked through Costa Rica, and played daily games of ultimate Frisbee." I mean that I literally did nothing for 2 years. I lived with my parents, didn't work at all and lived off both their unbelievable patience and my life savings. To my friends I flaunted the fact that I was taking an extended vacation from real life. I bragged about sleeping all day and playing all night while my peers grappled with new jobs, new marriages, and the other struggles that come with an entry-level life.

It was all a cover-up. I was a wreck. I was Sean Connery with a blindfold on, crashing the Red October of my life into a Royal Caribbean cruise of Watching The Same SportsCenter Three Times In A Row. The cocky college senior vanished; in his place was a helpless 24 year old with no marketable skills, one whose asylum of rational thought had been seized by the inmates of fear and self-doubt. And so when I looked out on the world, I saw no Promised Land, only a barren 'Krazy Kat' landscape. Wherever God was, I thought, He wasn't out there, and whatever He was doing, it wasn't helping me at all.

At the time I didn't see what Joshua's spies did. When they exclaimed "The Lord has given us the whole land", the picture is of the Lord with arms stretched out in offering, as if Canaan were a surprise party He'd worked for months to throw. I missed that. I had no sense that God's work of winning was already underway in the world, and, as a result, also in my life. And so when it was time for me to cross into the Canaan of adult life, I pitched camp at the borderline and cowered at the giants in the land. I was not a free agent.

I eventually got my act together and matured into a real adult with all the trappings, like a 401(k) and lingering guilt over my carbon footprint. In so doing, I started to live the good news of our free agency: that God has gone in front of us. God's omnipresence and omnipotence means that He isn't just in every place right now, he's in every place all the time, and when he is in every place all the time, he's already at work. So as we walk our lives, we never step somewhere outside the work of the Lord. And His providence to us in that free agent walk is the occasional meeting with a Rahab- someone or something that reminds us that God has already been there, saying to us in one way or another, "I know the Lord has given you this land..."

Unless you count a 10 second recruiting pitch I once got during 8th grade quick recall**, I don't have any experience as an actual free agent. But the book of Joshua validates my deeper free agent identity, and yours too. Our lives are not solo flights across endless oceans. We can trust that God is in the places where we're going and already working his salvation plan, loving us enough to pave a landing strip for us in it.

**- Quick recall is an Academic Team event in which teams answer trivia questions using hand buzzers, 'Jeopardy' style. It's the type of game where a steroid scandal is kids injecting ginkgo biloba and then reading back issues of The Economist.

RICHMOND

I am a charter member of Underdogs Anonymous, my membership being a condition of my release from sports movie rehab. This addiction is real, and I need the help.

I've watched 'Hoosiers' dozens of times, and I not-so-secretly believe that any goal can be accomplished, up to and including major orthopedic surgery, if it involves the music of Vangelis. 'Rudy', 'Miracle', 'Invincible', 'Remember the Titans"- these are my drugs of choice, and they are not safe for me in any dosage, large or small, because I will take them literally. I am, after all, a guy.

Science tells us that there are two separate areas of the masculine brain: the area that perceives reality, and what scientists call the I Can Do That region, which is in a small lobe near the left ear called the Incredible Things About Me cortex. This lobe primarily governs the male understanding of his own skill set, including physical attractiveness, barbecue ability and athletic prowess. Because of this anatomical quirk, it's like we have a little Terrell Owens in our mind, whispering bursts of cockiness and hype to all of us. And he goes Mach 5 when watching a sports movie.

I Can Do That Area: Rudy made the football team? And it's a true story? That's awesome. But you know who's even more awesome than Rudy? Me. I've been favorably compared to a jaguar before- lithe, agile, predatory. I could definitely do that. In fact, why waste time? It's decided: I'm going to be a pro athlete.

Reality Area: Are you sure? Something doesn't add up. Nothing about you says 'jungle cat', or even 'hamster'. Your best sport, historically speaking, has been Four Square. Your last company softball game ended up on YouTube. 1.4 million hits and counting.

I Can Do That Area: Sports movies don't lie. How come underdogs always pull through in real life? How come hard work and perseverance always result in big payoffs and sexy, out-of-your-league girlfriends? And how come my life has a soaring, inspirational soundtrack? Answer me that.

Reality Area: That never happens. None of that happens in real life.

I Can Do That: Just as I thought, no response. You can't refute sports movies, little man!

Reality Area: I just did. Stop ignoring me. This is ludicrous.

I Can Do That Area: What I need is to learn a sport that will truly test the outer reaches of my athleticism. I need something I've never played before, so football, baseball, and basketball are all out. I have to know, when I am being paid to play sports and endorse body sprays that smell like a cinnamon grenade exploding in a potpourri bunker, that I was truly as incredible as I imagined.

Reality Area: I'm doing Sudoku now. Call me when the movie is over.

I Can Do That Area: What about soccer? It's perfect! A test for my enormous yet untapped athletic skills, and also completely unpopular. Practically nobody plays it!

Reality Area: Oh dear.

This exchange is a highly stylized, but mostly true, story of how I ended up 10 hours from home, in Richmond, Virginia, semi-hypothermic in the gravel parking lot of University of Richmond Stadium, waiting to try out for a professional soccer team. I blame my inner Terrell Owens.

—

Flickers of antebellum Virginia still mark portions of Richmond. It is both impossible to forget that you are in a Southern town and sometimes difficult to notice. Statues of Confederate heroes march along Monument Avenue like a granite funeral procession, blocks away from the stylish and trendy Cary Street shopping avenue. Here, buried in the west of the city, is the University of Richmond Stadium. Its vanilla walls create an aura of almost aggressive blandness. From outside, when athletic exertion converts to steam and rises out of the stadium, it resembles a colossal bowl of oatmeal.

I was there because, in January of the previous year, I bought a soccer ball. I kicked it around my apartment a bit, mangling my CD collection and knocking over my TV twice while juggling it. I'm sure the downstairs neighbors thought I was training pandas to demo bathroom tile. Before long the little Terrell Owens in my brain started chattering. How good I could get at this game?

I dropped everything and practiced every day for a year. At the end of that year, in February, I signed up for an open tryout with the Richmond Kickers, a USL team in soccer's minor leagues. Now, in the UR Stadium parking lot, I discovered that, despite the South's reputation for humidity, they also had actual season change. It was cold, and I didn't see Clark Gable or seersucker suits or any sweet tea anywhere. 'Gone with the Wind' had lied to me.

The mix of hopefuls in the locker room made the Mos Eisley cantina look like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. As I tied my cleats, I glanced at the locker across from me and noticed a player who looked like a hobo. He eschewed the traditional athletic look for a less conventional one involving unlaced sneakers, blue jeans and wild, bed-head hair that said "Officer, I have never seen crystal meth before in my life, and if I had, I would never store it in a Yoo-Hoo bottle like that." I thought about him as I jogged out onto the brittle, frost-bitten turf to warm up. It comforted me to know that at least one person at this tryout would be worse at soccer than I was.

As we stretched out, the head coach paced in front of us.

"Where does everybody play?" he asked.

I sensed that he wanted something more specific than "on the field somewhere". This was a question I had hoped to sidestep. Position? I had never played one. Apart from a pair of cameos for a friend's league team, I had never played anywhere but in pick-up games at the park, where the tactical precision often left something to be desired. Far from being structured affairs, the positions in these games were often exercises in Brownian motion, shifting rapidly from attack to defense to some nebulous place in between.

"Defense," I said, certain that this was the safest place on the field for someone with so little experience.

At the other end of the field, I saw the vagabond-ish friend juggle a ball, performing tricks with the easy fluidity of a dolphin pod at play. When it finally dropped to the ground, he took off running, sneaker laces a-flap, at a speed normally reserved for birds of prey. In denim. Not a good sign.

—

Soccer is a truly international game. If your goal in life is to meet as many people from foreign countries as possible, a soccer tryout is a great bet. The only better option is a university physics department, although the physicists will be in worse physical shape, and also more inclined to explain how the universe is theoretically shaped like Abraham Lincoln's forehead.

The Richmond tryout, in addition to hosting at least one Croatian player so spindly that he made Mr. Bean look like Hulk Hogan, also had enough Dutch players to repopulate west Michigan. And the Dutch, as it turns out, are not pessimists. Their optimism works overtime. They are the kinds of upbeat people that could find the silver lining in a cholera epidemic, likely due to massive levels of Prozac in the Amsterdam water supply.

The South American players all moved like ballet dancers, the cobra-like touches of their feet ghosting the ball to the exact millimeter where it would be of most dangerous use. The Americans all looked like free safeties, capable at any moment of rampaging off the field and tearing down great portions of downtown Tokyo. The Dutch never stopped smiling, so great was their joy at playing soccer and, possibly, being under the influence of strong narcotics.

I tried to stay confident. I'd done everything sports movies told me, I told myself. I'd worked hard, dreamed big, and followed that dream when everyone told me it was crazy. The only question now was, how long would this charade last? I wanted to take my place in the pantheon of superstar athletes already. I didn't have all morning.

We began by playing small-sided games to warm up, 8 v 8 on shortened fields. I played well, connecting some short passes and causing little fuss defensively. I made a couple of galloping runs up the left wing, the kind Ashley Cole specializes in. When I was open, I made the pleading, hands-open gesture that, in the body language of soccer means 'Pass it to me, I'm incredible.' And I said 'Nice ball!' a lot, even in situations that didn't necessarily call for it, like when the coach asked where the orange pylons were.

Clearly, I thought, destiny was afoot, like Aslan in Narnia. Everything at this tryout was going well. This proved that 'Rudy' was right, and had been right all along; things like this can actually happen. Destiny was on my side. After lunch I would blow up, score a few goals and then receive the reward I spent my entire childhood dreaming of. Destiny. After lunch.

—

After lunch destiny did not show up. We switched to a full field game, 11 v 11, and my presence in the game devolved from "genuine competitor" to "fight for survival."

The one thing you cannot possibly understand about upper-level soccer (or all sports, for that matter), which I did not before this tryout, is the speed of it. Everything happens fast. The ball moves like electricity, appearing first in one place, then immediately in another. It's like trying to keep track of a pinball score- eventually you just give up and enjoy the pretty colors.

My choice of 'defense' as a position proved decisive. It exposed me to a new type of terror that only someone who has watched a lanky African running at warp speed towards them can understand. I was immediately swamped. Waves of attacking players exploded at me like meteorites crashing to Earth. Exhaustion rendered my thoughts unintelligible, like those bridge columns with advice like, "ruff the diamond so that East can dummy and coagulate the Geronimo." As each attacker muscled me aside, helplessness overtook me. Nothing made any sense. I was playing terribly. This wasn't supposed to happen.

When the coach mercifully subbed me off, my cheerful new Dutch friends met me at the bench to encourage me.

"Nice work, man," they said, smiling. "You could barely tell you've never played before!"

I appreciated their support, but what I wanted was their anti-depressants. Game over. Tryout over. Dream over.

My aunt met me at the door of her house as I returned from the stadium. "How did the tryout go?" she asked.

"Fine," I said.

\----

For a long time, I didn't know what to do with Richmond. I went to another tryout a month later, this one for an MLS team in Kansas City. I had a lot of fun and played better, almost scoring a goal on a free header during one of the games. But by then, the illusion that I could make something happen from the tryouts was gone.

Back home, I returned to my cubicle and my apartment and went on with my normal life. In one sense, I had taken a great adventure- after all, hadn't I gone from zero to a decent soccer player in just one year? But in another, more practical sense, I had nothing to show for it, as if I'd traveled the world but taken no pictures to remember the voyage by. What was the point of Richmond?

I still wonder about that today. Trying out for a soccer team with no prior experience seemed like a reasonable idea at the time, but in retrospect seems so ludicrous, like a game of Truth or Dare that ends with somebody prank-calling The Hague.

The most ridiculous thing is that I honestly thought that I could make the team. I can admit that now. I really thought that if I worked hard and gave maximum effort for only a year, I could get good enough at soccer to compete with players who had played the game their whole lives. And when I reflect on this naivete, this year of my life where I believed the Gospel of Rudy to the point of near-delusion, I wonder how I ever thought that way.

It's pretty easy to lose sight of truth in our lives. Every day, Gospels come at us in infinite shapes and sizes, proclaiming messages of 'truth'. Most seem as innocuous as the Gospel of Rudy, and we allow these little tidbits of folk wisdom entry into the palace courts of our lives without much thought. What harm can they do? But when we're not looking, those extra Gospels stage elaborate, bloodless revolutions. 'Try your hardest' becomes 'My job is my identity.' 'Best foot forward' becomes 'I'm only lovable when I look good.' Jesus, the ostensible King, gets quietly ushered off the throne of our lives.

That experience is backed up by the apostle Paul, who saw this Gospel competition play out in the community of believers in the Galatian church.

"I am shocked that you are turning away so soon from God, who called you to himself through the loving mercy of Christ. You are following a different way that pretends to be Good News, but it is not the Good News at all. You are being fooled by those who deliberately twist the truth concerning Christ." (Galatians 1:6-7)

Sometimes we talk ourselves into thinking that our hearts are fortresses. After all, we think, we're not raging atheists or living in obvious sin. Surely this must mean that the walls have grown higher- our spiritual expertise must be increasing and our hearts are no longer so gullible in the extreme.

But Paul's admonition to the Galatians reminds us that fake gospels happen to everybody, not just people who aren't trying hard enough. They might not send us on such far-flung tangents as pro tryouts in Richmond, but they send us nonetheless, in countless directions and countless ways, both big and small. Our awareness of this allows us, not simply to redouble our vigilance, but to show grace to ourselves and others for that forgetfulness.

