Day 24 – Baseball and Starfish

Merritt has wanted to spend time doing all kinds of sports activity this past year. The dad requests to shoot hoops or throw the baseball or do bean bag toss is at an all time high. Those competitive juices are flowing and he loves giving me a run for the money. While I have so many times failed him by being too busy to accommodate these requests, I am practicing more regularly the joy of simply saying YES! Today it was 2 hours of playing baseball. I have not pitched this much since middle school. I only have hit him once 😝. He is hitting the ball and working on his swing for a potential try out this next school year. We live right next to the rarely used school ball fields and bought the ball gloves so “Batter Up!”

I am enjoying the read and challenge offered in The Starfish and the Spirit. The energy of a movement starfish is to fill everything every way with the fullness of Jesus.

So often we think of our churches as needing to simply fill the chairs and get enough volunteers and pray for enough resources to maintain the place. But if we say our church is healthy but the murder rate in the city is high and fatherless homes are increasing and addictions are increasing and children are going to bed hungry, then we’re not making any gains in universal flourishing in every corner of culture and that means we certainly are not healthy. We can’t just talk about filling buildings we must talk about filling everything everywhere!

The Biblical word for this is Shalom. Shalom means universal flourishing , wholeness, and delight – a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspire joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights. Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be!

Tomorrow we begin our international journey. While the world is incredibly messy right now, we trust the Spirit’s leading as we go forth. We are ready.