Middle School Football...

...is an interesting conglomeration of seemingly random events taking place with expert precision. Unfortunately, the ones on the field at the time don't think so!

So I've got a 6th grader playing on the middle school football team. Coach Bernard installed a wonderful defense whereby my son can excel at exactly one position on the field...awesome! So now he gets in the game! I had the awesome responsibility of rotating 8 players who don't normally get into the game at all into 2 brand new positions on defense. They played masterfully! In fact, once they got the idea, the opposing team had to run the ball up the middle to gain any yards and avoid our undersized, underexperienced, underachieving "speed ends" as I call them! It was good fun!

I liked the fact that all the players had wet shirts and wet heads by the end of the game tonight. Everybody played. There were only 26 players present today, so the 8 that I had on rotation represents something close to 30% of the entire roster! And we got them in at 2 positions. It was way cool!

Pepper played great. He ran hard and even got in on some tackles. Not bad for a scrubby little 6th grader! Ha ha!!!

Getting in the game is a good thing. I suggest that, as Christians, we actually get into the game once in a while. I don't know, maybe voicing an opinion about an issue using Scripture as your basis for truth...maybe helping out people in need though it may require some time and commitment on your part to do so...maybe preaching Christ and Him crucified for sins for example...maybe avoiding debauchery a little more often than not...just get into the game!

Getting in the game is the way these middle school kids will actually learn how to get better. They ran drills all week, but when the "newbies" got into the game, they made some mistakes. However, they learned quickly what their mistakes were and learned quickly how to avoid said mistakes in regards to future plays.

If we get into the game as a Christian, we are bound to make mistakes. That's the nature of the game. We can run plays in practice in our pews on Sundays, but until we actually try it out on the people in the world, we won't be able to really learn any lessons.

Rob Bell from the Nooma video series spoke about the name of God...the Tetragrammaton...as our Sunday school watched this past Sunday. It was awesome! Those 4 little letters, YHWH, are actually "breath sounds" in the Hebrew. Breathing always brings to mind "the Spirit" in Scripture. God breathed life into our nostrils. Breath preceeds speech and God spoke into existence the entire universe. With each breath we take and exhale, we are speaking the name of God! Four breath sounds...four exhalations...and we say God's name over and over and over. Maybe that's why we should be careful of what we speak about, huh? With each word spoken we must exhale...and when we exhale, we are basically using breath sounds...or speaking God's name. Pretty cool! I suggest you check out the Nooma videos if you can. Rob does a much better job than I do at explaining the whole thing!