REFLECTION: Sharing our Discovery

Written by Paul Wetzig.

Have you heard of the game pickleball? It's one of the fastest growing sports globally and at the moment is experiencing massive growth in Australia, amongst other countries. It's a game combining elements of tennis, badminton and table tennis, played with a perforated plastic ball and solid paddles on a court about one-third the size of a tennis court, with a lower net. It's an exciting game that can be played by people of all ages, as long as you can hit a ball over a net!

I love playing the game as often as I can as to get started it doesn't take a high level of fitness, or skill, and my kids can join me in having a go too, mixing with all kinds of people of different ages. Since discovering the game, I've loved telling other people about it and encouraging and inviting them to join me in having a go as it's just so much fun and so easy to try!

Have you noticed that when you find something you enjoy, love, or believe in, whether it's a hobby, a sport or a cause, it's very easy to invite others into your discovery? You want to share all about the thing you've found and you'll share it with anyone you can find who's vaguely interested to listen!

I've been reflecting on Matthew 28:18-20 lately, where Jesus sends out of his disciples to make more disciples, I've been thinking about what this would have been like. What message would they have taken? How would they have taken it? Who would they have taken it to?

My guess at what this would have been like, is a bit like my encounter with pickleball. What they would have taken is a story of how this person Jesus had impacted their lives. How the experience of spending time with him, and the community around him, had enabled them to find a kind of life they had never experienced before as fishermen, tax collectors, religious fanatics or whatever it was they did. How living out, not just knowing about, his teaching of loving God and loving others in radical ways, had transformed their world, brought new life to them.

What they had to share were not theories or ideas, principles or concepts but a lifechanging experience of grace and love with the one who claimed to embody the very presence of God.

How good is this thing we've found!

And as well as the excitement of what they'd found, I think they would have been pretty generous in who they told about it as well. This was not a story just for some people, this was for everyone, because this experience of generous love was something anyone would want! This community they were now part of, marked by generous, gracious loving hospitality was God's radical new family of hope. Who wouldn't want to be part of it!?

This was something so exciting and significant that it was genuinely life changing.

So in Acts 3 when a beggar stops Peter and John on the way to the temple to ask them for money, they can't help but tell him that even though they don't have any cash, they do have something they can share with him - the resurrecting power of Jesus. And from here more people are drawn into this encounter, as the man is healed and his life is radically changed.

I wonder what this looks like for us, if we are seeking to live as followers of Jesus' way, as we are given this same challenge - to go into our communities as disciples and share the good news that we have experienced.

In what ways have we encountered the radical, transformative love of God that makes it impossible for us to stay silent about it, longing to share our experience of God's goodness, grace and mercy with others. Not ideas, concepts and theology, but our experience of God's transformative presence at work in our lives.

What is it that I have to share with my friends, neighbours, the lady standing behind me at the shops, that excites me about the community of faith that I'm a part of? How as a community we are experiencing God at work and joining in with God's work of restoration.

If we don't have an answer for these questions of what the good news is that we have to share, I wonder if we would be bold enough to pray and ask God to open our eyes and our hearts to see and know God's love afresh in our lives and in our world. To renew and transform us by grace to be those who have experienced unimaginable hope that we long to share with all we encounter. To invite God to rekindle in us such a deep love that we can't help but share it.

That knowing and living Jesus way, would for us be the new pickleball!

The thing we've found that captures our hearts and minds in such a way that we long to share it with whoever we encounter.