Sterling Griggs

This is what a broken and dislocated forearm on a 9-year-old girls looks like. Unfortunately this belongs to my youngest daughter, Emme, who accomplished this after trying to catch herself from hitting the floor after falling off the balance beam at gymnastics. Accidents happen - and sometimes they really hurt! - but sometimes they affect more than just your physical well-being. If you watch sports or have a child who plays sports or were an athlete yourself, then you know that injuries are often part of the game. Not everyone experiences bone-crushing fractures or career-ending injuries - most of the time it's knocks and bumps and the occasional bruise. But there are those moments where you watch an athlete's future dissipate before his or her eyes by an injury that prohibits them from coming back. And that is hard to watch. As someone who has never really experienced any of this in the athletic arena, I've often wondered what it's like to receive the crushing...

My goal in life has never been to be rich and famous and so far that goal is well within my grasp. Compared to the billions of people on this planet, my world is relatively small, but I still long to make an impact for someone greater than myself. But there was this one time when the world around me stopped to take notice. At least the guys in one of the basketball gyms at Wake Forest University did anyway. I will be the first one to confess that my skills as a basketball player have never been much to brag about. Pick-up ball games at the church gym with the fellas that I grew up with were pretty much my only experience with the game, and every once in while I would chuck up a deep ball and see it tickle the twine, but that was not the norm. Being a short guy who could only dribble with his left hand, my specialty was playing annoying defense and fouling the opposing players, which I became pretty adept at doing. But my church buddies didn't seem to care all that much - I guess...

The conversation was going well with my pastor friend until the topic shifted to another church in his area. Apparently, talking about THAT church hit a nerve. Before I knew it, I was hearing an in depth analysis about THAT church and its pastor and how they are stealing people from all the other churches in the community. Stealing? Well maybe not "stealing" he admitted, but courting them with flashy worship and big events and the "cool factor" that other churches like his own couldn't pull off. And did you know, he asked, that they don't even preach the Bible there? In fact, in their worship services they play "secular" music. The substance in THAT church is about an inch deep and a mile wide, he told me. I wasn't sure how to respond to such a scathing critique about this sister church. Probing a little deeper I found that my friend had never actually been in that church to observe these heretical phenomena nor did he personally know the pa...