My eleven-year-old son recently competed in a fifth-grade basketball tournament in Hot Springs and on our seventy-minute drive home we were talking about one of teams that was really good. I mean, scary good, for a group of fifth-graders. (They had a kid who was supposedly widely known to be the best fifth-grader in the state.) We also discussed another team that was really bad (I won’t say which one).
But we didn’t say anything about the other teams.
So I said to my son: “Quinn, I don’t care if you’re horribly bad at basketball or exceptionally good; the one thing I don’t want you to be is irrelevant. In other words, if you hit the locker room after a hard-fought game and no one even noticed that you played, you’ve blown it. If you try hard and miss every shot, I’ll still be proud of you. If you take a gamble on defense and fail, I’ll still be pleased. But if you don’t work hard, hustle, and give it all you’ve got, then you might as well not play.”
It seems to me that this is the Lord’s mindset as well.
Passion. Risk. Abandon. These are all unmistakable aspects of allegiance to Christ. Jesus illustrated that by saying: “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy, he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.”
Is there anything worse that kingdom irrelevance? What will we be remembered for... our passion or indifference?
1 comment:
Thank you for that. It's so easy to become irrelevant.
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