"Character............................"

Friday evening was passionately filled with watching my grandsons play basketball. Varsity very decisively beat the opposing team, holding them to minimal scoring while successfully plying their own skills with the hoop at the other end of the court. Our younger boys, however, earlier found their game a mirrored reflection of that one, their loss not quite as drastic, but bad enough. I approached the young assistant coach afterwards, suggesting that, even though we had lacked equal height in that particular contest, the kids had shown much grit in their defense, our offense being the main reason for the loss; but he determined that proper execution of the basics would have eliminated any such advantage for the other side, our real troubles being that we possessed only one fellow who had any real talent, pointing to a fellow who is a good player, to be sure, but one whom I personally perceive to suffer from ego and attitude. Such opinion, though, was kept to myself while pondering if this is what we promote in sports, just how does that carry over into what we teach them in the sanctuary… In re-reading a bit of Ravi Zacharias yesterday morning, I was taken quite with his take on a question put to Christ by two of the disciples at their initial discovering of the Messiah. “Where do you live?” they wanted to know; and the author thought such a simple interrogative, of all the queries one might ask of a man just pronounced by John the Baptist to be “the Lamb of God”, surely giving reason for pause concerning its motive. He pointed to its significance being a matter of importance to that culture, those people at that time, their value of such credentials; but my own thoughts reversed the roles. How would each of us, I wonder, respond if Jesus were inquisitive of our existence, not necessarily seeking a physical location, a post office address, but a descriptive analysis of where we reside in our day-by-day identity, indeed, in our manners, our interaction with others, and our relationship with our Creator? What might we say in return?.....