Huddle-Time!

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Maybe I don't know a lot about football - all they do is tackle each other and fight over an egg shaped ball anyways, right? - but I do know that they like to "huddle" a lot.  

Football players gather in a huddle to plan out their next move and to create a strategy to win the game.  When they're in this huddle they get themselves psyched up for the next play about to happen.  Sometimes this huddle happens simply because the players need a pep-talk...maybe the game isn't going so great and they need a word of encouragement to pull them through and get them back on track.  

When the players are done having their "huddle-time" they break off from the huddle and go back out to the playing field re-focused and ready to make some winning moves, all thanks to the pep-talk from the huddle.  The huddle isn't where the game is won but simply where the focus to win comes from. 

You can learn from this idea if you think of football players as Christians and "huddle-time" as church-time.  As Christians, when we go to church that's our "huddle-time" and the broken, lost world is clearly our playing field.  Church shouldn't be what Christians "do", it's where we should be going to get our "pep-talk", to be rejuvenated, to get re-focused and to get psyched up for the game!  The game is all about ministering and spreading the Gospel to a broken world!  

You can't win the game inside the huddle but you can win the game out on the field when you apply what you learned inside the huddle. 

Church should be that time to re-focus on the game and to get ready to jump back out on the field.  Church should be that time to come together as a team and to prepare our game-plan for the field.  Church-time is huddle-time.  COME ON TEAM, LET'S DO THIS!

"Church isn't the game, it's the huddle."