The Game Before the Game While cleaning out a closet in our house recently, my wife and I stumbled upon a collection of my old sermon notes from when I first began preaching. In the earliest of days I would actually pace around and record the message into a little hand-held tape recorder and play it back so I could hear how it was going to sound, and then sometimes if I didn’t like it, the process would start all over again. Looking at those old materials, I was instantly transported back sixteen years in time to the days where I would get physically sick before taking the stage. I relate to Eminem who is puking in the bathroom of the club before his first hip-hop battle in 8 Mile. It wasn’t my mother’s spaghetti (I could never preach with something that heavy and rich in my stomach) but I would almost always end up dry-heaving before speaking, and it went on like that for a year or so. I would feel shaky, light-headed, and absolutely terrified that I would go blank as I tried to remember the key points of my message. I usually felt better after throwing up and I always felt instantly fine the moment I took the stage. All the jitters would dissipate and I would be a duck in water doing what I was born to do, it was just agony to get there. Here’s the deal. The bridge between all that practice and the performance is the pre-game routine. The same is true in nearly every endeavor. You have to win the war inside before you can win the war outside. Now, I will never speak without going through an important ritual. It involves being on my knees in prayer and admitting my weaknesses so that I can enter into Christ’s strength. Some things I have integrated into my preparation have come from athletics. The best athletes know how to quiet themselves as they get ready to compete. The Brazilian Pele is considered the greatest soccer player of all time. In his book “Mental Gym” Gary Mack interviewed Pele about his game before the game ritual. He would go into the locker room and grab, not a soccer ball, but a couple of pillows. He would go lie down somewhere all by himself. He would put a pillow under his head and a pillow on his face. This is so weird, but it gets better. He said he would go back to his childhood in his mind and imagine himself playing soccer on the beach, because that's where he first started to love the game. He wasn't playing for money, he was just playing because he loved the sport. Then he would flash forward and start to remember the highlight reel of his career. He would picture the best moments when he had performed exactly like he had wanted to. After watching all of these great moments in his career, he would flash forward now to what he had come to do, the reason he was in the stadium he was in. And he would then begin to think about the way he wanted to play and he would actually feel himself watching himself in the movie theater of his mind doing what he had come to do. Then he would get up, join his team, do some stretching, and he was ready to enter the stadium as an unstoppable force. He would be cool and calm—he'd already watched himself win, now all that was left was to do it. When I read this, I immediately thought of something Peter said. He wrote, “So prepare your minds for action and exercise self-control.” I see this in Moses. Moses knew what he was supposed to do. Make a nation out of slaves, unite the clans, bring God’s people into the promised land. But he wasn’t winging it. He was given the steps: stick to snake, hand to leprosy, water to blood, and he did this twice before he got to Pharoah’s court on game day. He prepared his mind for action and made sure it was locked in. When it comes to unpacking what God has put inside of you, we can’t overlook preparation. What if instead of referring to your time with Jesus in the morning as “quiet time” we just referred to it as getting your game face on. Take a pause, take a breath, hear from God, spend time in His word, let His truth wash over you. No matter what is in front of you today, be it a stadium full of people you will be performing in front of, a rocket launch to Mars, a classroom of students you will be speaking to, or a toddler you will be parenting, this much is true: You’re not ready to face the game until you’re ready to put on your game face. Questions to ask yourself: What things should I remove from morning routine to start my day strong? What things should I add? What is something God has put inside of me that I might be hindering from coming out by not preparing my mind for action?

Casper ten Boom Ever since Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, work has been arduous and difficult (Genesis 3). But as we saw yesterday in Genesis 2, work is not inherently bad—it was designed by God to be an act of worship and a meaningful way for humans to glorify God and serve others. In a fallen world, it can be difficult to see the goodness, meaning, and eternal significance of our work. I doubt many of Casper ten Boom’s neighbors saw his work as particularly meaningful. As his daughter Corrie remembers in her book, The Hiding Place, for more than sixty years, ten Boom went to work every day as a thoroughly ordinary watchmaker and shopkeeper. But while ten Boom’s work may have appeared as monotonous as a ticking timepiece, he was a man who loved his work and saw it as a calling from God, using his watch shop as a means of serving his neighbors and discipling his employees. While ten Boom was faithful in using his work to serve the Lord in these “little things,” God had plans to entrust him with much more responsibility as Europe headed into World War II. After the Germans invaded the ten Booms’ hometown of Haarlem in the Netherlands, the family began leading a clandestine effort to hide Jews and others at risk of extermination by the Nazis. Ten Boom’s unassuming watch shop quickly became the front door for the anti-Nazi underground network in town, used to smuggle food and other supplies to the Jews hiding in the ten Boom’s home behind the watch shop. The ten Booms even used encoded messages about “watches” as a means of communicating critical information across telephone lines undoubtedly tapped by the Nazis. On February 28, 1944, German soldiers caught the ten Booms and sent Casper and Corrie to prison. At the time, the ten Booms were hiding four Jews and two members of the underground network. When the ten Booms were taken away, they didn’t know if these six people were dead or alive. Weeks later, while detained at Scheveningen concentration camp, Corrie received an encoded message informing her that “All the watches in your closet are safe.” Corrie knew that the six had made it out alive. Ten days after his arrest, Casper ten Boom died at the age of eighty-four, not knowing that his work as an entrepreneur and watchmaker had been used in this dramatic way to accomplish God’s will one more time. I recently had a chance to visit ten Boom’s watch shop, which is still in operation today. As I approached the front door, I was startled by how ordinary and unassuming the shop is. Most people walked by without giving the shop a second look. I’m sure many of Haarlem’s residents looked at Casper ten Boom’s work as a watchmaker the same way, wondering what meaning there was in tinkering with timepieces for sixty years. But ten Boom leveraged his work in some incredibly meaningful ways. And while our stories will almost certainly not be as dramatic as ten Boom’s, the fact is that as we embrace God’s call to create on our lives, He will use our work in ways we can’t even imagine to accomplish His will.