This past weekend we got to hang out at the Winnebago 4th of July Festival. If you’ve never been there, it’s pretty typical of most small town summer festivals. Lots of food, games, entertainment, and stuff for the kids. Each year for the kids they have all these inflatable things like giant slides, bungee run, etc. This year one of the inflatables was sort of a gladiator meets king of the mountain. Each person got a giant foam stick and what looked like a hockey helmet. The object of course was to knock the other guy off the top.
My son Gage, just turned nine. He’s barely 4 foot tall and let’s just say he’s still light enough for me to carry him and we’ll leave it at that. Gage decided to challenge one of our senior high students, Chandler. Chandler is from nxt.lvl, our youth group at New Life Church. Definitely a David vs. Goliath kind of matchup, considering Chandler is 6 foot tall and over 200 pounds. Gage was undeterred. He was ready to fight.
Chandler is a pretty competitive guy so he didn’t just walk in there and fall over. He put up a bit of a fight and made Gage really work for it. But, in the end Chandler gave the fight to Gage. To make it interesting he kept it tied up all the way till the end. But at the end he allowed Gage to have a decisive and exciting victory.
Gage is a smart kid. In fact it’s almost scary sometimes when I think about how smart he is. I don’t think that Gage had any delusions about what had happened. I’m certain that he knew that Chandler had given him the win. But, that really didn’t change his attitude about the win. He could not have been more excited about the win and the grin on his face was proof of that.
For Gage, he had beaten the giant! He had faced insurmountable odds and yet walked away victorious. It didn’t matter that the fight had been given to him, he still felt all the glory of the win.
As I considered this, I realized that our lives as Christians are sort of like this. We win against all odds. Even though it should be a foregone conclusion for us to lose, we still win. Our God has fixed the fight for us. He has given us the win. We ought to celebrate just like Gage did in his win. Think back to the childhood victories that you had just like Gage’s win against Chandler. Why not celebrate the victory you have in Christ Jesus just as child would?
