Being a bloke, i have this competitive edge. Even as a youth worker (I know i shouldn't) I very rarely will try less than 100% when it comes to playing sport or games. As i tend to play at this level quite often it is always a little embarrassing and humiliating when i lose. If it is a young person that beats me then they also like to tell me that they have beat me.
Of course then my pride kicks in, because my best wasn't good enough, and that sometimes hurt. I also look at some of the people in the Bible and see how good they were and what great things they did and sometimes wish i was like them.
I was reading in Judges about Samson and the person he was and i remember back to Sunday school and hearing how strong he was and how muscly he looked on the picture. i think i always saw him as the 'Christian superhero' (apart from Jesus obviously) and was someone who was the ultimate superman. Yet i was reading a commentary the other day saying that idea of Samson being that type of man, the He-man of his time is actually wrong and denying God. It says that people were surprised by his strength and that they couldn't work out where he got his strength from. Well, if he was that muscle bound man people wouldn't have been surprised and people would have known exactly where he got his strength from. His muscles.
So to know that Samson got his strength from God challenges me to think about how much i use my own strength and how much i depend on God. OK maybe not at table tennis, but at life stuff, things that are really important. Decisions that i need to make, Choices that come my way, i want to be strong, but how often do i realise there is no way i am strong enough on my own.
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