Basketball

Tonight was probably the last night that I will get to play basketball for a couple of months.  This really is no big loss to any of the guys I play with; I am a pretty lousy basketball player, short, slow, can’t jump and really can’t shoot either.  So besides the fact that I’m really not in that good a shape, let’s just put it this way I’m not usually the first guy picked.  But it is a good way to get some exercise and probably the easiest sport to play with a group of guys so I go every Friday I can.

You don’t really think about the little things that you do on a daily or weekly basis until you get moved out of your routine and aren’t able to do them any longer.  I’m really going to miss the bible study groups, I host a men’s group on Tuesday nights and Kate and I have a coed group on Thursdays.  I like to say that we have the longest tenured groups at Christ Fellowship Cityplace, the coed group started after Kate and I started dating so it has been meeting for about 4 years. The men’s group started before that, I wasn’t even part of it when it started.

This is exciting, when I started writing I wasn’t exactly sure what I would write about, but it turns out we are going to talk about the men’s group.  Like I said it started without me, when I signed up for the mission trip to Peru most of the guys that signed up for the trip were part of a men’s group and they told me and one other guy that if we wanted to go on the trip, that we had to join the group so that was that.  It was lead by David Oates who was the campus pastor at the time, and he was leading the mission trip.

I guess I need to tell you that it was a group for recovering addicts and was hosted at a type of halfway house.  Sometimes we get caught up in having people want to like us, and our house has to look just the right way. These guys had been to lower points than I could ever imagine and it didn’t matter where we met, just that we were meeting and that we were studying God’s word.  It is really cool how God meets us where we are.

It turns out that after several months David got a job at a different church.  He wouldn’t be leading the group any more.  We weren’t sure who was going to lead the group or what was going to happen, it turns out that I would be leading the group.  I don’t know exactly what the other guys saw in me or if it was just the fact that I had been going to the church for a longer period of time than them, but I will always be thankful for that group of guys.  God used them to give me the confidence to be the man I am today; they made me realize that I didn’t have to have all the answers. 

The group eventually moved to my house when the facility closed, we have gone through a 9 month study called top gun that our church runs twice.  The second time I was the co leader with a good friend Steve Riniker.    No one else is left from the original group, we have guys that have been in the group for over 3 years, and guys that have started in the past month.  We average 12 to 15 guys a week and it is powerful to see the work that God has done in a lot of these guys.   I am just humbled to be a part of the group let alone host it at my house.

I am going to miss the fellowship, it is probably going to be the thing I miss the most when I am gone for a couple of weeks.  To think I would have never thought about being in a group 4 years ago, and it will be the thing I will miss the most while we are gone.  I’m also really excited to see who steps up and takes a larger role without me talking so much during the group.  Sometimes God needs to take someone out to allow another person to step up, at least that is what he has done for me…..

The question is when is it your turn? When is it my turn?