On your marks, get set, go!

Before most major events and activities there is a time of build up. That may be four years build up to the Olympics, it may be 12 months build up to Morden Park Holiday Club, 9 months wait for a new birth or anything really. However there comes a time when the build up is over and it is time to start.
For the Olympics that is (officially) on Friday although some football and a few other things will already have taken place. For Morden Park Holiday Club that is today with 261 excited and/or nervous children getting ready to come and play games, sing songs, make crafts, do quizzes, have fun and, most importantly, discover something about what it means to have a relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

The build up comes to an end and the new thing starts. Yet it seems that for many, we get stuck at the starting gate. There is every opportunity to run the race but we get caught waiting for something more; something to move us to the next step. For others we are so eager to get going that we go ahead of the starting pistol and have a false start then, through that failure, feel that we are disqualified for the race altogether.
God is calling us to be part of the race together. Not competing with each other but supporting one another as we saw some of the cyclists do recently in the Tour de France.We don't have to look hard to find sport used as a picture of the Christian life in the Bible. Paul writes, "One thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead,  I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenwards in Christ Jesus." (Phil 3:14-15) There are many others too, but the consistent feature is that to be in the race we must be running. We don't just wait at the starting line once the pistol has been fired hoping that the person who fired it will then come and tell us in a different way to get going. The Christian life is for living and living now, not just for what happens once we've died. So let's run the race before us and see the amazing things that God will do.