Welcome to Dallas, TX, home of the billion-dollar stadium!!  Also home to a great many close personal friends.  Courtney and I lived in Dallas briefly after we got married and in that time made several close relationships with people, relationships that we still maintain.  Whenever we come to Dallas we like to spend our time with all of these people.  Today we are hanging out with Tony and Laura Hernandez and their three super cool kids Amelia, Max, and Noah.  In some ways I feel like an uncle to these kids.  Anyway, I’ve spent the morning making ‘sticker pictures’ with Amelia, a game which consists of taking strips of stickers and placing them randomly on people.

We’ve got a Hoops of Hope event later this afternoon in Richardson (a suburb) and then another event tomorrow in Ft. Worth before Revolve starts on Friday.  Things are going a little better than they went at the Baltimore event.  Our last event was in Charlotte and we had a nice little turn out, including former pro-bowler and Carolina Panther Collin Branch and his family.  Thanks to the Lifeway Bookstore for allowing us to be there.

Who knew raising money would be so hard?  Don’t misunderstand me, I love what we’re doing and feel so blessed to have this opportunity, but it’s not a cakewalk.  A lot of people say to us along the way, “I wish we could do that!  God must really be blessing you!”  Of course I say thank you and take the compliment.  But if I’m honest sometimes I want to say, “Yeah, He’s blessed us by showing us how selfish we are.  And no, you don’t wish you could do this because it’s hard.  We’re exhausted all the time and considering the amount of energy we are expending, we really haven’t raised that much money.  I mean we’ve raised money, but I think Courtney and I had this perspective heading out that we would meet big donors along the way and that the money would just pour in and that people would just show up out of the woodworks to shoot hoops and raise support.

At our last event, we raised $46.00.  Of course I was happy that we raised any money.  Any is better than none, right?  But the truth is that $46.00 is two children, two children that will have a blanket, two children that will have school supplies and soap, two children that can stay in school and learn.  And those two children will not know how they were fought for, how each dollar made for them was raised one dollar at a time.              After the event I began thinking on the gravity of saving two.  The “lost” parables came to mind as I thought about how Jesus feels about one life.  In the parables, the man with a hundred sheep left them to go after one, the women who has lost a coin turns her home upside down until she finds it, and the waiting father throws a party when his rebellious son comes home in shame.  These parables are about the eternal salvation of one soul, but aren’t they also about value, the value of one human being?  Isn’t the underlying point of those passages that Jesus sees our value and fights for one because, in His eyes, each one of us is a “treasure hidden in a field”?  One sheep, one coin, one sinner, one child.  We fight for them because he fights for us, each one of us, and he never stops.  Isn’t that the journey that we are on?  Isn’t that the point of what we’re doing?  Isn’t that the gospel?

We are learning the value of one.  We are experiencing the hardship of the fight.  There is blessing in the battle for one child and I truly hope that as we continue this journey we will not miss that blessing because where one is saved, the wedding feast is there, where one eats, they are lifted onto the shoulders of the high places, where one raises money and shoots a hoop, there is hope.  One ball, one hoop, one child.  Thanks be to God.

Michael