Dear Friends,
In our neighbourhood it is a delight to watch the children play, not street hockey, but street cricket! We certainly have trouble figuring out the rules. We got some help, sort of, from the Yorkshire County Cricket Club Rules of Cricket:
You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out.
When they are all out, the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out.
Sometimes you get men still in and not out. When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out, he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in.
There are two men called umpires who stay out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out. When both sides have been in and all the men are out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game.
Fortunately, it is much easier to follow the rules of discipleship. You just have to, in theologian Paul Tillich’s phrase, “accept the fact that you have been accepted.”
And then you are in, and the game is amazing, and it goes on forever!
In Christ,
Revs. Bob and Helen Smith
Photo by Yorkspotter . Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Taken from the Wikimedia Commons.
A version of this message first appeared in the Saturday, August 21, 2021, edition of Tidbits.