A story crossed my screen this week that made me grin before it made me think. A 47-year-old pastor has suited up for college football again, nearly thirty years after he last wore pads. Not as a coach. Not as a chaplain with a whistle and a clipboard. As a player, on a roster, with teammates young enough to be his children, doing the same up-downs in the same August heat.
My first reaction was the one you probably had: his back is going to hate him. My second reaction was slower and quieter. What kind of man is willing to be the oldest guy in the locker room?
Beginners have a particular kind of courage
There is a courage we all recognize — running into danger, standing up when it costs you. But there is a humbler courage that gets less attention, and I think it is rarer: the willingness to be bad at something in front of people who are good at it.
Most of us stop doing that somewhere in our twenties. We find the things we are competent at and we build a small kingdom there. We stop taking lessons. We stop asking questions in rooms where everyone might already know the answer. We stop volunteering for anything we might fumble. And slowly, without meaning to, we trade a growing life for a defended one.
A man in his forties strapping on a helmet with nineteen-year-olds is not mostly a story about athletics. It is a story about someone who decided he would rather be a beginner than be finished.
"Give me this mountain"
Scripture has a name for that spirit, and it is Caleb. Forty-five years after he first scouted the promised land, when the dividing up of the territory came around, he did not ask for the easy valley. He said this:
"And now, behold, the LORD has kept me alive, just as he said, these forty-five years since the time that the LORD spoke this word to Moses, while Israel walked in the wilderness. And now, behold, I am this day eighty-five years old. I am still as strong today as I was in the day that Moses sent me; my strength now is as my strength was then, for war and for going and coming. So now give me this hill country of which the LORD spoke on that day" (Joshua 14:10-12).
Give me the hill country. Give me the part with giants in it. Caleb had every reason to coast, and instead he asked for the assignment nobody else wanted.
Notice, though, what Caleb was actually leaning on. Not his knees. Not his own grit. Twice he says the LORD — the Lord kept me alive, the Lord spoke this word. His confidence was in the faithfulness of God to a promise, and that is why it did not evaporate when his body aged. Grit runs out. God does not.
God is still handing out assignments
Here is what I want you to hear, whether you are twenty-two or seventy-two: the Holy Spirit is not conducting a farewell tour of your life. He is still calling, still gifting, still nudging people toward things that look slightly ridiculous on paper.
I watch it happen. Someone who has never prayed out loud opens their mouth and prays for a friend, and something shifts. A person who assumed their teaching days were behind them ends up with a room full of kids. Someone who was sure they had missed their window says yes to one small thing and discovers God had been holding the door with His foot the whole time.
None of that requires a dramatic story. You do not have to go make a comeback at anything. But you may need to stop assuming the interesting chapters happen to other people.
The room where you learn
Being a beginner is easier when you are not alone in it, which is one of the reasons I love our Wednesday Bible Study. It meets this week, Wednesday, August 19 at 6:30pm, and what happens in that room is exactly what happens in a good locker room: people at wildly different stages, asking real questions, nobody pretending to have arrived. Bring the question you have been embarrassed to ask. That is what the room is for.
And if you have already asked God for a hill and He has not given it yet — if the door has stayed shut and the years feel loud — you are not disqualified and you are not forgotten. Jesus is not measuring you by your comeback. He came for people at the end of their strength, and He is the one who renews strength, not merely rewards it. Show up teachable. Let Him carry the rest.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.