Dear Friends,
Professional basketball player Jeremy Lin was crashing on his brother’s couch in New York, warming the bench at the Knicks’ games, when he was put in to substitute for an injured player. He went from an unknown benchwarmer to superstar. During the 2011–12 season he unexpectedly led a winning turnaround with the Knicks. “Linsanity” was born. Lin was the first American of Chinese or Taiwanese descent to play in the NBA. In 2019 he became the first Asian American to win an NBA championship with our own Toronto Raptors.
When asked about his meteoric rise, Lin, out of his Christian faith, said it was a miracle, “God’s fingerprints are all over the place, where there’s been a lot of things that had to happen that I just couldn’t control. You could try to call it a coincidence, but at the end of the day there’s 20, 30 things when you combine them all, that had to happen at the right time for me to be here. That’s why I call it a miracle.” Many times we look back over our own life stories as individuals and as a congregation and see that “God’s fingerprints are all over the place.” Thanks be to God that miracles still happen.
In Christ,
Revs. Bob and Helen Smith
Photo by nikk_la. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Taken from the Wikimedia Commons.
A version of this message first appeared in the Saturday, July 31, 2021, edition of Tidbits.