Watching the NBA Playoffs has been very exciting this year. Beside the awful officiating, it has been one of the best playoffs in recent history. As I am watching the contact that guys like Lebron James, Dwight Howard, and Kobe Bryant are taking, it reminds me of growing up and learning how to take a “hard foul”.
In middle school we would play lunch time basketball and to this day it counts as some of the most competitive games I have ever experienced. I remember that when we would get to game point, we had a rule of ‘no easy baskets’. That meant that, even if you had to ‘kill’ someone, you did not let them score. I remember going to the basket and what happened to me, it should have been a federal crime. I remember that at first I used to shy away from the contact because of the pain I was going to feel and I would never make a game point basket. Something interesting happened one day and I decided that on game point I wasn’t going to shy away from the pain anymore. I decided I was going to embrace it and go towards the contact.. Something amazing happened: I got fouled really hard, but it didn’t stop me, and I scored the game winner!
I never realized the lesson I learned on a playground during lunch would help me in life. It started dawning on me recently that I was shying away from the “hard fouls” of life. I was running from tough situations instead of embracing them and going after them like I did on the middle school basketball court. As leaders we must realize that God wants us to not shy away from hard times, but to embrace and attack them. That doesn’t mean it’s not going to be painful, but the truth is we are going to experience the pain any way, so we might as well go towards it. I believe even in the midst of tough times we can live how Paul tells us to, in hard times: 2 Timothy 2:3 “Endure hardship with us like a good soldier of Christ Jesus”.
My wife and I were in Kingston, Jamaica for the last few days for a wedding. It was my first time there and it was great! Late on Sunday night I was having my “Encounter Time” with God ( I call it encounter time because that is what I want to do every time I spend time with Him). I was reading in Deuteronomy and in the first 8 chapters, one word that I kept reading was ‘remember’.
As we all know, God did some tremendous miracles during the time of Moses’s leadership with the Israelites. In case you don’t know or recall them all, here are a few ‘minor’ miracles:
• Rescued them from a dictator by sending plagues the world has never seen before: Hail, Locusts, Darkness, Livestock, and much more.
• Parting the Red Sea so that upwards of a million people could cross it. Also killing the most powerful army on the planet at the time.
• Feeding and hydrating millions of people in a wilderness and desert for 40 years. His only means were the sky and a rock.
God wanted them to remember, because He knew that human nature is to forget the great things God has done for us when we are going through tough times. He was getting ready to take them into their promised land and He knew they would have some tough moments ahead of them, so He wanted them to remember how good He was even though their current circumstances didn’t look like it.
Before we enter our Promised Land we will most likely have a time where our circumstances look bleak. In those moments we must “remember” when and how God has already shown up in our lives. It may be that He performed a super-natural miracle, answered a prayer, or set you free from entanglement. It’s these bleak moments that test and grow our faith to make it as Peter wrote “pure as gold”. In order to occupy the “Promised Land” God is giving you, one thing you must do is “remember” what He has done for you in the past. The biggest thing we must constantly remember as members of the New Covenant, is the death and resurrection of Jesus. That one act shows us how much God loves us and is for us.
