Rewarding Rocky Roads
God’s sense of timing is clearly different from ours. With just a few decades on this earth, we feel limitations press hard against our hopes and ambitions. Sometimes the many challenges we face in life and ministry seem to threaten the vision we trust God has given,...
One Little Boy
Forty teenaged boys arrived with their coaches at Lake Langano in summer of 2006. This week was the pilot summer sports camp for Sports Friends, the first and only camp like it in all of Ethiopia. The boys came from homes struggling with the poverty common to their...
Vision Of Beauty
She was 11 years old when she joined a Sports Friends netball team in 2013. She was the second born in a family of four. Her father had died long ago, and she lived with her mom. She obviously had talent and influence and great potential for leadership, so Coach...
You Are Missing Something
When God created the world, He used His voice. As children made in His image, our spoken words carry weight. It changes things, a word spoken. Perhaps this is why the Proverbs and epistles both have so much to say about how as God’s people we are to use our mouths....
Unstoppable Camaraderie
What happens to church-centered sports ministry in southeast Africa when a global pandemic shuts the entire country down? What happens when worshippers are no longer allowed to gather together corporately, or even to mingle freely with their neighbors because the risk...
The Landscape Of Malawi
“A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path; it was trampled on, and the birds ate it up. Some fell on rocky ground, and when it came up, the plants withered because they had no moisture. Other seed fell among...
Life Lessons, Taught And Caught
Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you. - Philippians 4:9 Our Coach Development Coordinator for Kenya, describes one reason why the Sports Friends ministry is making...
New Seasons
Fourteen years ago, a group of boys gathered around their coach, a tall and kind man from a church right there in their own city in Kenya. The coach knew that there was more to life than the poverty and crime those boys saw as normal. He knew there was opportunity,...
The Journey Of Joy
By Tohru Inoue (Difficult subject matter) On a weekend in 2008, when Joy was in primary school, her younger sister was so hungry that Joy went out and borrowed 10 shillings (roughly ten cents) worth of food from the neighbor’s restaurant. When her father came...
Judged By Another
One spring evening, a coach was kicking a soccer ball around after practice with a few of the Middle Eastern boys on his youngest team. They were waiting for the girls team to finish up, and monkey-in-the-middle was the game of choice for these seven, nine, and twelve...