Needs Improvement

My second ‘job’ is in sports broadcasting. OK that sound way more legitimate than it really is. For the last couple of years I have been lucky enough to get to broadcast the Hope Bobcat High school football games for the local radio station. It’s not really a job more like a hobby that someone else lets me do.

When I first got the gig, I was terrified about how bad I would be. I tried to read up on any advice I could find about calling football and made it a point to listen to as many radio and TV broadcasts as I could to try and pick up anything to improve. It is one thing to hear a broadcast it is another to try and do one! After two seasons, I’m not sure if I have gotten any better but one strange thing I have noticed is I’m a lot more critical of the announcers of any game. Now I pick up more of the broadcast foibles, poor explanations, redundancy, errors those kinds of things. Even in those at the top of business, I hear things being said and think that’s not how it is supposed to be done. It’s not that I think I am better than any of the professionals[i], it’s just now I see the standard so much clearer and see how hard it really is. I hear all the wrongs more clearly but I can’t quite figure out how to do it any better.

I think the same thing is true for people seeking morality and faith. Most people don’t take time to consider such things; they just go along with what is being done. If however they are forced to make decision for themselves, they find themselves like me; able to see what is wrong but not then necessarily how to figure out to do it right. We see wrong, we don’t like it but how can we figure out something better? Many religions and philosophies are full of criticism and complaints but not many solutions

Here is where Jesus is different. Jesus came not just to convict us but to change us. Not just to show us our errors but to show us something better.

"The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

John 10:10

He doesn’t just deconstruct our thinking or force us into a mold, He transforms our lives, give us a higher standard, a better way (Romans 12:2). He doesn’t just open our eyes to the flaws but gives us a way to change, to wipe the slate clean and to become something better than we have ever been.

It is not just enough to know I need to improve; I have to find a way to make it happen. And Jesus is that way!

[i] Ok maybe Terry Bradshaw

Comments

I Know All Those Words, But That Sentence Makes No Sense To Me

Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...

Master Your Self

In a contest for the toughest president of the United States, it would be hard to go against Theodore Roosevelt. He was known for his “manly” pursuits hunting big game, climbing the Matterhorn, participating in boxing match while president. (These weren’t play fights, he lost the vision on one eye because of them!) Once before he was about to give a speech an assassin shot him in the chest. Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital and insisted on giving his speech, still wearing his blood-soaked shirt! Teddy might have become tough but he wasn’t born that way. He was a sickly child that suffered from severe asthma that almost proved fatal. As was a young boy, doctors discovered that he had a weak heart, and advised him to get a desk job and not strain himself. He was homeschooled because of his many illnesses and spent most of his time indoors. But then as a teen his father, whom Teddy Roosevelt revered, told his son, “ ...

Why Does A Lion Tamer Use a Chair?

Ok, I know you have seen the image. A lion tamer enters in the cage of the beast and forces it to obey his commands using a whip, a gun and a chair. Now you can see how the whip and gun could come in handy but you might be wondering why a chair would intimidate an animal as powerful as a lion? Clyde Beatty taming a lion with a chair It's not that the lion is afraid of the chair -- it's that the lion is confused by the chair. Cats are single-minded, and the points of the chair's four legs bobbing around confuse the lion enough that it loses its train of thought. Casually put, the chair distracts the lion from wanting to claw the lion tamer's face off. The powerful creature could destroy the chair in moment’s notice but instead it is distracted into submission. It’s not too much different than how Satan controls us today. By the power of God we could overcome anything that he would use to subdue us. We can overcome the evil one (1 st John 2:13-14). ...

Ecclesiastes 12:10

Search This Blog