Red Rover.
Do you remember the game ‘Red Rover?’ If you fancied games with a little contact as a kid, then you probably loved Red Rover. I was from a broken home so I fed off contact sports. Games with contact is a form of counseling for poor folk. It probably also helped that when I was a kid, I was short, stout, and built very similar to a cannonball. I was devastating when it came to Red Rover. If you are unacquainted with Red Rover, the game requires two lines facing each other and hand-linked solidarity that the iron curtain would envy. Everyone squeezes their neighbors hands and the enemy line sings the infamous “Red Rover, Red Rover, Send (Insert the name of probably the weakest looking kid) right over.” Whoever got called out had to barrel their way into the opposing lines in an attempt to break their lines of defense by rupturing their opponents clasped hands. Failure to do so resulted in that individual having to join the opposing team; success in the bursting of the enemy bonds resulted in being able to choose one person to take back to their team. A war of attrition if there ever was one. I recently learned this game is played in many corners of the world and has many names. For instance, it is also called “forcing the city gates,” which sounds so much more epic. What is more, the two lines are called “East vs. West” which reminds me of rap battles from the 90’s. That sounds so much more intense than simply ‘Red Rover’ and intense is exactly the way I remember the game feeling. It is funny that young guys will hardly ever hold hands with each other or sing, but you throw them into a little game of Red Rover and they will not only hold hands while they sing, but they will swing their clasped hands as they sing. Amazing what the right circumstance will help us to do, that we would not have done otherwise with different conditions. Red Rover was not for the weak of heart though. It was a sweat inducing situation for all parties involved. Do you remember that feeling just before first charge?
There was a cohesion that you cannot buy in the store. A sense of trench warfare that created a like-mindedness and fraternity that seemed inseparable. I can still all these years later recall the moist handed anticipation…the battle ready unity… the clinched teeth… the sizing up of who we are going to win to our team next.
Your teammates hands were grabbed like it was your first date in middle school, all sweaty and stuff. Chants were sung into the air like an anthem with a sort of belligerent tone. Dirty clotheslines were readied to be unleashed. Grips tested and drive by encouragements offered down one side of the line to the other. Everything was about stopping them together.
If you stop them from breaking through you then you win the person they sent to destroy you.
In some ways, I feel like my life has shifted into an epic game of Red Rover.
Our family since arriving in France about 8 months ago there has been a wave of hits to our family. Just to name a few: there has been at least 4 terrorist attacks, one of which we were in close proximity... Whitni had to have emergency surgery months before the arrival our daughter Naomi Ruth…After arriving on the field here to serve, we learned that our organization is needing to cut 800 personnel before Christmas… I just found out that I tore my ACL playing rugby and that it will require a second reconstructive surgery…and we have struggled watching our kids spend the holidays away from family. Not to mention the fact that we have been drowning trying to learn French, which is a lot like volunteering to be water-boarded. The hits have just kept coming. The enemy has chosen to send his best barreling belligerently towards us.
It feels like with each new blow that someone is peeling away another layer of our strength.
Like Red Rover though, what has sustained us has been those who have grabbed hands with us as we reach our hands out to our neighbors. Every prayer and encouraging thought that our people around the world have shared with us has been like a death grip holding us steady. Sometimes we have had to lean up the resolve of others on our behalf just to make it through the week. We are so thankful that so many back home are not limp-wristed when it comes to holding our hands in this work.
As if hanging over a cliff, our hands are dug into those of the Savior and hidden deep within His firm grip.
I have thought a lot about holding hands recently. I am not sure what triggered it, but maybe it was as I read how Jesus took Peters mother-in-law’s hand. It says he touched her hand. G-d could have left out the word 'hand,' as He chose to do elsewhere and it is still powerful that Jesus touched people and they were healed.
I could not read past it any further when I saw that He touched her hand.
This small detail is present on purpose. It was included because He knows how we connect. He wanted to let us know that Jesus touched her hand. Think about it for a moment. We grab the hands of the ones we love. We clutch the hand of the dying friend in the hospital. Even after all these years, I still very vividly remember holding my grandmother’s hand on her deathbed. It is strange that as I came there to encourage her, she was holding my hand in a final attempt to instill something bold in me.
We hold hands as a symbol of connection and unity. It goes beyond just boyfriends and girlfriends, while it is certainly not less than that. Have you ever watched the captains of a sport walk out onto the field holding hands? It’s like that maybe. Even more, have you every stared with unending wonder at the hands of a newborn. While holding my daughter Naomi Ruth, I forgot how little and yet defined their petite hands are. My hands are dinged up and scarred from more than a few choices for hard living, but hers are not.
If you have ever let the endlessly fascinating hands of your first daughter grip your pointer finger then you know the power that I speak of.
We put wedding rings on our hands of all places. Even the finger we chose has its roots in a tradition about that particular finger'sconnection to the heart. We even have this phrase in English of “taking someone’s hand in marriage.” When we hold someone’s hand it tells the world that we are with them and they are with us. It is not strange at all that we hold hands when we pray. Laying hands on people was the prescribed way for communal prayer in the most desperate of times for Christians of old.
When sin plundered and death was ready to strike. Christians walk through death together. We finish with hands locked together.
Is not the gripping of the hand in some small way an intermingling of the souls? It shares a direction and purpose. What your hands are carrying, I am carrying. No splitting a pole. Does not even this superstition tell us something about the fact that we would rather be linked together than walking apart? If you have ever had your hand captured by someone who loves you like that, then you know the kind of rocket fuel type empowerment that comes with it. There is little doubt that we are where we are today because someone clenched our hand with an unbreakable resolve. They refused to let us wander far from the path. I love that Jesus, when describing how we could never lose our relationship to Him, spoke in terms of “No one snatching us out of His hand.” What a loaded choice of words.
It is also meaningful to me that Jesus invites us like He did doubting Thomas to dive our fingers into His nail-scarred hands and to stop our free fall of doubt and to instead believe.
I feel like the Church has clung to our hand like that. That may not seem like much, but for us it seems like the difference between feeling alive and feeling like you are dying alone. While we feel like our lines of defense have been getting bombed, there are other parts of the game that have turned in our favor as a result. There is another story running parallel to the fact that we are on the struggle bus, and that is the fact that G-d is working in big ways around us. Our small Church plant that we are working with has continued to see people come to the Lord. A few of which have talked to me about the possibilities of a discipleship relationship. We have been constantly positioned to reach out to the lost and there never seems to be an end to the ways in which G-d might possibly position us around someone who needs to hear.
It is like I feel His hand at my back beckoning me further on. That the momentum of the game is about to switch and I need to pay attention.
This last weekend for instance, I had the opportunity to serve and share at one of the larger refugee camps in France. The way I ended up there is a tall tale in itself, but it will suffice to say that it was an absolutely G-d arranged thing. As I reached out my hand to a Muslim man and walked through the Gospel for over 45 minutes, it occurred to me that I was here for just such a time as this. Our family can reach out, because there are others holding on to us. We have often felt like the weakest kid on the playground getting called out in an epic game of “Red Rover.” Sometimes we are so wimpy that we run out of air before we even make it to the enemy line, but G-d is using us anyways. He is choosing our fumbling and stumbling to break through some seemingly impenetrable enemy lines. He has driven us far even when we felt like we were running on fumes. He keeps calling us out.
We feel like there are a hundred people back home who could break these lines better than we can, but our name just happens to be the one called. This seems so daunting, but G-d is in no way overwhelmed with what stands before us. There is great courage in that even if there isn’t any encouragement in our legs.
He has used the cheers from so many to breathe hope into our lackluster effort and challenge us to seize the brief moments we have here in France. Grace has held our family close in hand to the Lord. A grace made crystal clear by so many of you who have backed our play. As you send us with ferocious love, we are freed up to plunge our lives into enemy lines to rescue others. It is no game that we find ourselves in, but the war to end all wars. It is for that reason that it is no time to shrink back. It is no time to play small. We want to devastate the errors and work of the enemy as best we can with our brief lives and leave whatever happens into the hands of our Father. This is not a time for putting up anything less than white-knuckle resolve. It is too hard and it requires too much sweat and tears to do it in a lesser way. We are indebted to you who have tattooed “hold fast” on your hands and chosen to grab hold of our family like we were a sailor falling into the sea. This last rough patch in life is surely not going to be the last. It is going to take a lot more of that to get the job done and we invite you to double down all over again. You enable us. You enable us in the best possible sense. You are an instrument in the hand of a G-d who makes the inadequate into the able. You are holding our hand, and because so we are better positioned to extend our hand to others who need it.
Let them send whatever they want over, we are ready, if He is willing.
