Relocating To Elfland

Last winter I was shoveling snow with my neighbor, who’s from Brazil, and I asked him how he thought his country would fare in the upcoming World Cup. “Ah,” he said, “they are a team full of stars; but can they play together? That’s the question.”

Personally, I thought the Brazilians played very well as a team before their shocking elimination last week. But my neighbor put his finger on something I have observed more than once during the proceedings in South Africa: there is a huge difference between having a skill set and having “game sense.” You may have a player who handles the ball as if it’s attached by a tether. He may have more speed, power, agility, and elusiveness than anyone else on the pitch. But if he doesn’t have game sense – if he doesn’t have a “feel” for the game as a whole: the field, the movements of teammates and opponents, where he is and everyone else is, and where the play is going next – any contribution he makes to winning a tournament will be more or less accidental.

There’s a lesson here, I think for Christian discipleship. A lot of Christians I know are working hard on their “skill set” (or at least they know they ought to be working on it). They work hard at Bible reading, prayer, attending worship, being a faithful husband and father or wife and mother, being more honest, being a more diligent employee, etc. And practice makes skillful. But there is such thing as a fairly skillful Christian who hasn’t got a lick of game sense. He works hard at the things he has been told good Christians do; but he has little sense of what game he is playing. He doesn’t really grasp, for instance, what it is to be a bearer of God’s image; he doesn’t understand what humans were created to be. He doesn’t have a good feel for the story of God’s restoring His image in a new humanity, or of the part he and others are to play in this story. He doesn’t see clearly who and where his opponents are, because he hasn’t mastered the movements of God’s kingdom in history, or in his own time. He doesn’t, therefore, live with a deeply informed sense of calling, of the “goal” toward which he and his “team” are driving, of what he and they have been redeemed unto. And thus he tends not to grow much beyond the items on his holy checklist. Put him through the paces of Christian disciplines, and he may look like a star; but in the “real world” of kingdom engagement he looks disconnected from the main action, even confused.

Of course, Christians without a skill set are guaranteed disasters at game time; but soccer is far more than kicking a ball well, and Christianity in the world is so much more than making all the right moves in my practice sessions with Coach Jesus, or even on the pitch. There is a sense of what the game as a whole is about, of what’s going on in this particular moment of this particular game and how it relates to what’s happened before, what’s happening elsewhere on the field, and what’s coming next – and without this sense, we end up with a lot of individual practice sessions, while the game itself is never played. I may be going off my rocker, but then again maybe I’m on to something. You sure know the difference when you see it on the field.