Last night, my wife and I were flipping back and forth between the Monday Night Football game and the Yankees/Rays baseball playoff game. Now I grew up playing both sports and attended a school where football was king and every kid played baseball since the time they could hit off a tee. My wife on the other hand attended smaller Christian schools where the choice of athletics was limited. She loves basketball and volleyball. But unfortunately one of those sports is in a major labor dispute and the other one is barely on TV. Being the loving wife that she is, she puts up with a lot of football and baseball. Last Wednesday night, which many consider the best night of regular season baseball ever, she didn't have a clue. And a few days later she asked me, "Did something happen the other night with some baseball games?"
Yes babe, something did happen.
All of this leading up to last night. My wife has a hard time understanding some essential parts of both baseball and football.
In football, she cannot seem to grasp the concept of the downs. You have 4 downs to get a 1st down unless you get 10 yards on any given down which then makes it 1st down again. But on 4th down you can punt because you may not get a 1st down. It's quite hilarious listening to myself trying to explain something to her that I have understood since I could hold a football.
But last night the discussion was on baseball. What is a ball and what is a strike? Essentially the conversation boiled down to the strike zone. What it is and who decides it. We were watching and she was guessing what the pitch was. The handy, dandy strike zone tracker on TBS certainly helps! But sometimes the the ump would call a strike when the pitch seemed to be on the edge. Her mind couldn't handle the discrepancy and the subjective opinion of the ump. I then tried to teach her about setting up a batter and a infield shift, along with a sacrifice squeeze.
These things from baseball and football are second nature to me and most guys (and girls if they're from Iowa). I've grown up around sports and the lingo. But the discussions with my wife brought another thought to my head. What about the Gospel?
How do we explain the Gospel? What do we say to a person who has not been exposed to the church and the "lingo" all their life? We need to keep things simple and realize the message of God's love through Jesus Christ must be kept simple to those who have never heard it before. On Wednesday nights, I've been teaching through an outreach curriculum that uses a technique which condenses the Gospel down to 10 words: Christ died for our sins and rose from the dead. Now, is that everything there is to know about the Gospel? No. But we must be patient and understand that many people don't have the background to be jumping into talking about the hypostatic union and the 4 creatures found in the book of Daniel. Sometimes we need to start at the basics of who God is and what he has done for us.
Remember, not everyone knows what the strike zone is and how to get a first down, so start simple and see what they learn!
