Spike the Ball
A friend of mine thinks that we who do ministry need to learn to “spike the ball.” When football players finally get the ball into the end zone, they don’t stand around the goal post looking depressed, grumbling to one another about how many plays they had to run or talking about how they fumbled the ball on first down ten minutes
ago. No! They celebrate! They give each other high fives and jump up in the air and they spike the ball. At that moment it doesn’t matter whether or not they played flawless football. It doesn’t matter how many interceptions were thrown, or how many times the quarterback got sacked. They got the ball in the end zone and that’s the whole point of the game. It puts them six points closer to victory.
begins with the sentence, “I feel like a failure.” It has surprised me to discover how widespread this feeling is. I have not merely heard it from one or two women who had a bad year or from a woman on a campus that has suffered a significant drop in numbers around their ministry. It appears to me that it is the appraisal of many women I know regarding their lives and ministries.
I have been thinking about this and trying to figure out why we often feel this way. (Is it just the women?) I’m sure there are many possible reasons. My guess, though, is that this vague feeling flows mostly from a failure to remember how the kingdom of God works – through ordinary people living ordinary lives. It also works slowly and out of sight, like the mustard seed and the yeast in the parables Jesus tells in Matthew 13:31-33:
“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches.” The second parable says: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough."
- The series of weekly meetings where worship was awesome and the messages were creative, clear and compelling (move over Louie Giglio!)
- The small group Bible study you led that turned into genuine community, where girls shared their hearts, and brought their friends and they encountered God’s Spirit at work through his word
- That one on one where your words were not your own and seemed to penetrate to the very heart of the issue and a girl’s life was changed
- The party you pulled off and everyone is still talking about how much fun it was
- The ten women you personally led to faith in Christ this semester
A lot of parties are fun, but not that memorable. Not every Bible study or one on one will be so clearly effective. Sometimes you only get to be one link in someone’s journey to faith in Christ. So, be as faithful as you can with the ministry God has given you. Work hard. Pray hard. Learn from your mistakes. Accept the fact that both big events and small group Bible studies rarely come off without any glitches. Don’t beat yourself up over events or
conversations that were not “perfect.” (I often labor over these occasional articles and then don’t send them because I can’t get them just perfect.) Never forget for one moment that God is the ONLY ONE who is always faithful, perfectly insightful and, of course, wondrously creative. Consider the possibility that good is sometimes good enough. Go ahead and spike the ball.
© Melody Richeson, July 2010
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