Best Story of the Year

Dec 24th, 2008 | By art rogers | Category: Missional

No matter what your preference for church structure or missional engagement, you are going to love this story from Rick Reilly at ESPN The Magazine in his article, The Life of Reilly. The tagline is: There are some games where cheering for the other side feels better than winning.

The story is about a Christian High School that hosts a football game against a team of school aged convicts where the Faith coach asks the the supporters of his team to root for the kids who are down and out. And they do.

They make signs for them to break through as they run down an alley of strangers who have made a spirit line for them.

When asked by one of his own players why they were doing this, the coach responds, “Imagine if you didn’t have a home life. Imagine if everybody had pretty much given up on you. Now imagine what it would mean for hundreds of people to suddenly believe in you.”

After the game, players from both sides met in the middle of the field to pray. One of the Correctional School students, named Isaiah, asked to lead the prayer, and this is what he said, “Lord, I don’t know how this happened, so I don’t know how to say thank You, but I never would’ve known there was so many people in the world that cared about us.”

Now that’s what it’s all about.

HT: Brad Andrews