Learning to Celebrate (Something Other Than Sports)

When I was in Liberia, I saw a whole community celebrate because they had easy access to clean drinking water. The joy was tangible. It filled the air like a fresh pie in the oven. It permeated my soul. God was happy. You could feel it. Real celebration. Real praise.

Psalm 149 is a powerful song of praise. It says at one point: "Let them praise his name with dancing, making melody to him with tambourine and lyre! For the Lord takes pleasure in his people; he adorns the humble with salvation. Let the godly exult in glory; let them sing for joy on their beds" (Psalms 149:3-5 ESV).

In the middle of people celebrating water, it struck me. We don't celebrate like that. Ever. Except for when our team wins the Super Bowl, a national championship, a state championship, or something of that sort. I see it on Facebook. A team wins, and all of the fans celebrate. Publicly celebrates. Celebrates and they don't care who hears. They're happy. It's a great time.

Why do we celebrate sports in our society more than most anything else? Someone celebrating five years of a successful business that gives people jobs in a community is more important than someone sinking a game-winning basket. Someone turning their life around from meaninglessness to Jesus is more important than someone scoring a touchdown. Volunteering at a soup kitchen is more significant than a walk-off home run.

Maybe we're not invested in the important things of life like we are in sports. Maybe we care more about our children being athletic rather than spiritually mature. Often, we would much rather have him or her win a state championship rather than dedicate their life to serving the Lord. In a small town like ours, we don't have the obvious idols like they did in Bible times. In Ephesus, Paul faced the furor of the people who profited off of the temple to Artemis. But we do have idols that keep people away from church and being who God wants them to be. We sometimes veer into worshipping athletic accomplishment instead of God.

A friend of mine told me about a young man in the ministry. I interviewed this young man for this article, but his name will remain anonymous because what I am sharing does not portray his parents in a positive light.

A few years back, this young man had God interrupt his plans. He holds his state's record in the 800m dash. He went on to win nationals. And received a full ride to a division one college where he was on course to pursue his Olympic dream. If he wanted, he could have ran for a living, getting sponsors once he got out of college. Yet he gave up running a couple years before his prime.

In typical God fashion, tragedy struck and it made him reevaluate his life. He got in a car accident. There was some damage to his left side. That night, in the hospital bed, he prayed for the first time. The next day he was 100% fine but completely changed. His body hadn't changed one bit, but something happened to his soul in that accident. He then transferred to a smaller Christian college, being a tremendous blessing to the small school's track team. While he was there, he felt that he had to give up running for records and start running completely for God. He then transferred to another college - the college I went to - where they had no track and field program.

In completely pursuing God, he found a great amount of peace. But his parents didn't feel the same way. They had never missed a track meet, flying all the way across the country to cheer him on. Yet the first three times he preached in his home church - the church his parents go to, a church just a five minute drive from his home - they didn't make it. They would not attend to hear their son preach. The support that they show him being in the ministry is not even near the same support that they showed him in his running career.

Imagine investing your life - your time, your energy - in your kid being a star athlete. And then he gives it up to be a minister. How awesome would that be! Really, it's awesome! It might be tough to acknowledge how awesome it is because we misprioritized all of those years, but that type of spiritual commitment is what we should be striving for in our children.

I want to be clear. Sports are not evil. This is not an either/or situation all of the time although God made it that for this young minister. Our kids don't have to avoid sports to be who God wants them to be. There are many great Christian athletes out there. But we do need to realize the dangerous spiritual pitfall that sports can sometimes be. Sometimes we place sport above God. When we do this, a blessing such as sport can draw us away from God rather than supplement our total commitment to God. I see people choose sports over the kingdom of God time and time again. Let us be vigilant not to do that. Let us not celebrate or value sports over the most important things in our life. Let us praise God and become people who He takes pleasure in. Let us learn to celebrate!

Find Your Johnsonville

To put down thoughts regarding our mission trip to Liberia resembles telling people of a great painting by only showing them one square inch of that painting. But words and stories are all I have to hopefully inspire and drum up more interest in what God is doing in Liberia. It is in this feeble attempt to express what God did that I hope His Spirit intermingles with our souls and brings vitality and passion where our souls too often slumber.

I'm going to deal with the biggest achievement of the trip. But in doing this, I realize that God often turns what we thought was an insignificant moment into the most significant event, while the things we thought were great and amazing become a passing footnote to our lives.

Don Winters (left) and John Bennett (right)

Last year, our small Hope 2 Liberia team of four people, traveled to the Heart of Grace school in Lower Johnsonville, outside of the capital city of Monrovia. What we saw there was amazing. This place was different. It was kept up. It was clean. We are part of Hope 2 Liberia, but this place, on the outskirts of Monrovia, was really a place of hope for Liberia. Something was happening here. It was a city on a hill. It was a beacon of hope in the darkness.

But there was also a great problem. A problem we wouldn't have known about except for a random, divine encounter in the airport that eventually led us to Heart of Grace. The school and the surrounding community lacked water. The school had been given a well by a Rotary Club out of Lafayette, Louisianna, but the well had dried up. A man in the neighborhood had spent days hand digging a new well, only to never hit water. The only water they could get was down a steep cliffside. A journey they would make every day, bucket after bucket, because water is life.  

So we saw the situation, but we did not have the pumps and equipment to do something incredible. I remember the feeling in that small group that something would be done. And one of our group members, Jon Bennett, said, "I'm going to come back here and fix this problem." So he went home, 5,000 miles away from Lower Johnsonville and the Heart of Grace school, but that community stayed on his heart. He worked out a plan. His passion to help Johnsonville and his commitment to work hard to meet the needs of those who did not have the ability to meet their own needs, combined with the engineering know-how of John Pierce, brought eventual change. As you are reading this, someone from the community in Lower Johnsonville is probably filling her bucket with safe, purified water. Water that was unsafe to drink at the bottom of the cliff, that traveled through lines laid, and was filtered prior to reaching a spigot at the top of the hill.

Eric Wowoh

Eric Wowoh, a Liberian, founder of the Heart of Grace school, the executive director of Change Agent Network, and a servant of God of the sort I have never before encountered had this to say:

"We now have plenty of water flowing through our school and community here in City View, Lower Johnsonville. Water has always been a major problem for us in this community, especially during the dry season or summer months. We have never had a public system for running water, which has meant everyone had to travel many miles for their water.  In our case, this has meant walking up and down a very challenging, rocky hill to get to a well. Heavily pregnant mothers journeying up and down to fetch water each day has been very normal since people have lived here."

"This is now history as God sent twenty-four members of the Hope 2 Liberia team to help bring an abundance of fresh, safe, clean drinking water to the thirsty in this 17,000 strong community of Lower Johnsonville, including all of the students and staff that use our school, the Heart of Grace."

"Thanks for your continual support and prayers! We are very grateful to all who have helped. This is a huge moment for us - real development and real change. Water is, indeed, life. May God water and refresh your life as you have helped to water the lives of others in such need."

All of this challenges me. And I hope it challenges you. All too often we see the world off kilter from what God has designed it to be, but we just turn a blind eye and unleash our apathy. We say it's a fallen world and things will be this way until Jesus returns. But those teachings weren't given to us so that we could be complacent. They are an acknowledgment that we will always have a mission to accomplish.

People from the Johnsonville community
waiting in line for water.

But do you see what happened here? Thousands of people now have clean drinking water because of the passion of one man. John Bennett - not a pastor, not a plumber, not an engineer - founder and owner of Cool Cayenne Authentic Printed Shirt Co. in Muncie, Indiana. He made a difference. He would be the first to say that he couldn't have done it by himself, but what is happening in Johnsonville right now, as we sit in the comfort of our own homes, wouldn't have been accomplished without his faithfulness to Jesus. When John stands before Jesus and Jesus says, "I was thirsty and you gave me a drink." John will humbly say, "When did I see you thirsty? When did I give you a drink?" And Jesus will say, "Johnsonville."

May we each find our Johnsonvilles. May we each strive to make a difference. Instead of pretending we don't have to do anything and that God's plan will magically get done, may we take seriously God's call to be His hands and feet. We have to get busy being faithful. We are surrounded by the hungry, the thirsty, the immigrant, the naked, the sick, and imprisoned. And in loving them, we love Jesus. Let's love Jesus. Let's love our fellow man.