When my two youngest girls were in grade school, I was their basketball coach in the local recreation league. One night we were working on catching a pass and quickly shooting the ball. Most of the girls were doing okay, but one girl was just struggling. She was not my daughter and her mother was at practice watching my every move.
I wasn’t sure how mom was going to take this, but I sent the rest of the team with the other coach to the other end of the gym. I did keep one other girl to be a defender. The girl who was struggling to do the drill was going to see just how quick the defense could be on you, close to the bucket.
I put the struggling girl on one side of the lane and myself and the other girl, my defender, on the other side of the lane. I told the defender, “As soon as I throw the ball across the lane, you go play defense and block her shot.”
Well that is exactly what happened. If the girl caught the ball cleanly, she would always try to dribble once before shooting. As soon as she started up with the ball to shoot it, the defender would knock it out of her hands.
After several attempts at catching and shooting, the girl was very frustrated. So I sent the defender to the other end of the gym with the rest of the team. I then asked the girl if she now understood why she must catch the ball cleanly, not dribble once, but get ready to shoot immediately. She said, “Yes.” So we started to work just on that, catching the ball to immediately shooting the ball.
Several years later during a middle school basketball game, the girl who used to struggle to do the drill in fifth grade, caught a pass about four feet from the basket and immediately shot the ball and scored. Her mother was sitting in the stands about ten feet away from me. The mom stands up and points at me and yells, “You taught my daughter that, thank you!”
Now when that girl was in fifth grade I could have given her a book on basketball and told her to read it. I could have sent her mother an email to a youtube video and told her daughter to watch it. I could have told her daughter to just practice that drill at home. But when you have direct experience at something average retention goes up to 80-90%. If you only have spoken or written communication average retention is only 5-10%. So most of you, when you come to read these devotional messages, will only remember 5-10% of it, if anything at all.
Your faith must be active. You must get involved with active learning. Jesus, at the Last Supper, washed the feet of his disciples, which was a job for a servant. When Jesus came to Peter, to wash his feet, Peter said, “Lord are you washing my feet?” Jesus said, “What I am doing you do not understand now, but you will know after this.”
That last sentence has great meaning. When we get ready to do an experience a lot of the time we don’t get it at first, but afterwards that experience might have been the greatest single teaching moment of your life. Let me encourage you to get some experience with your faith. Get out of your own little world and reach out and be Jesus’ hands and feet in the life you are living.