Pick me! Pick me!!

I still remember what it was like.



Standing along the baseline of the "new" gym as we called it at the elementary school, learning about basketball drills in 5th grade. I remember we were going over the basics of everything, a little bit of ball handling and some passing drills as well. I remember that I was nervous about how things were going to go for me. After all, I had never really played basketball before. Mr. Outlaw (that was really his name too) had a few of the kids who knew something about basketball demonstrate what we were going to be doing. It didn't look too bad, other than that whole spider thing. Finally the time came and we broke into groups and the guys who had been demonstrating were choosing their partners to do some passing drills. Now I was even more nervous, because not only were these the ones who knew what they were doing, most of them were the cool kids too-the popular ones-of which I was not...really.

So there I stood, waiting to see what was going to happen. Who was going to choose me to help work on various bounce, chest and baseball passes with them? Then the thing I considered the most unlikely to happen, happened. The boy in front of me, the one who was a cool kid, one of the demonstrators, Michael Paul Smith, looked at me and picked me to be his partner. He wanted me to do these drills with him. He was one that I knew had played basketball before and was popular and I was the dorky kid hoping and wanting to be thought of as cool and popular. And now, I was being chosen to do basketball drills with one of the cool, popular kids, and even better it wasn't because Mr. Outlaw paired us together, but because Michael CHOSE to have me do them with him.

I'll be honest, I don't remember for sure how it went. I would love to say that I was awesome and did everything spot on, but I feel in my gut that that was most likely NOT the case. But it didn't matter, because I had been paired with the guy who was pretty spot on with what we were doing, so all I had to do really was try to do what he did and I was good.

The same can be said for our relationship to God. There we are standing along the baseline, seeing what we are supposed to do, knowing that really, we have no idea how to do it. We have no clue how to be holy, or pure or without sin. More often than not it seems like all we really know is just the opposite of those things. And yet there is Jesus, who knows how to do all of these things, and we hope that maybe he will pick us and show us how and teach us what we are supposed to be able to do. But then we look around and we see that there are all of these others who are probably better at these things or cooler than us and figure that one of them is really who Jesus wants to pick. But then the craziness starts and we are the ones that get picked. 1 Corinthians 1:30 tells us that we are united to Christ and He makes us what it is that we long to be for God: Holy, Pure, Sinless. And all we need to do is to follow His example and we are good.

Peace and Love y'all.