Lucy and Big Ben

Lucy, my 4 and a half year old, is IN LOVE with Ben Roethlisberger, the QB for the Pittsburgh Steelers! She has loved Steelers football since she was a baby and she has loved Big Ben since the first time she saw him play. She has a #7 jersey that she would wear non-stop if I would let her and she calls Ben her boyfriend. Ben is just over 20 years older than Lucy, think he would wait for her? She wants to invite him to her birthday party and send him a valentine. It is a really sweet little crush she has. When she wakes up after there has been a nighttime Steelers game she always asks how Ben did and if they lost she wants to know if he felt sad.

Last year when the Steelers made their incredible run to win the Super Bowl we took the kids to both the Pep Rally before the big show and the Victory Parade a few days later. For the parade we were in downtown Pittsburgh with 250,000 of the Steelers faithful thanking our team for the amazing season they had topped off with a world championship. It was amazing...people of all races, creeds, ethnicities, political parties, sexual orientations and on and on gathered with a common goal...celebrating a football team and the Lombardi trophy. It may sound silly to some but I felt such a sense of community with everyone there. It was a powerful things to be united with that many people all pursuing the same goal. Nothing was going to stop us from doing what we came to do.

I have gone back to that feeling so many times when I think about the state of the Christian church in America. We are so splintered and broken. Rather than allowing our commonalities to bring us together we choose to let our differences separate us. It is really sad because we are so much weaker when divided. I know that some will disagree with me...and I'm okay with that. I'm not talking about watering down the message of Jesus or fundamentally changing the theology of the Church (universal)...please hear that. But I am talking about majoring in the major things rather than the minor ones. I'm tired of the conservative church throwing up issues as smokescreens so they don't have to get along with their less conservatives brothers and sisters. I'm tired of the liberal church doing things for shock value to avoid getting along with their less liberal Christian family.

In families we have to have the hard conversations and in the family of God we are often afraid to have those hard discussions. So we agree to disagree and try to move forward, but really we are stuck in the same place where people have been stuck for generations. We don't really like one another and the lip service we give to "loving all God's people" is a load of crap.

While at the Victory Parade I wondered what it would be like to be with a quarter of a million people all cheering for Jesus, thanking Jesus for what he has done, and feeling unified by our love for God. I wondered what it would be like if we could all take down our defenses and set aside our differences and remember that Jesus loves us ALL and He died and rose again for us ALL. If we could, even for a moment, lay aside all of our differences and focus on worshipping God and serving him together it is hard to imagine all we could accomplish.