Its called innabundy. Its a swedish version of indoor hockey with a few different rules and we play it every Monday and Friday nights. The players range from 19 year old bible students, to mid thirty year old parents from Australia, Cameroon, Sweden, Germany, South Korea etc etc. We are all super different, but all very enthusiastic about playing. Some weeks we have two teams with one sub each, last friday we had twenty players split into four teams. Half way through we might change from three teams to two, so the players are all mixed up, sometimes in fluro vests or colourful sashes.

One of the funny things about it is, I will find myself cheering for everyone. I’m super competitive, but, if someone scores a really good goal, then, someone just scored a really good goal. Its kind of irrelevant who scored it. So I will hear myself yelling “yeah good defense, woah yeop and that was a good shot” All the time. And at first people will stop and be all like “What?”, but this week I over heard more people doing it. Cheering on everyone, because encouragement is great.

Sometimes I think i box myself in to what encouragement “should” look like. When really, all the time is good for encouragement. Have you ever had that thought of “Well, they are really good at that, so I don’t need to tell them I think they did well….?” I get that all the time, as if the only people that need encouragement are the people we judge to be not usually great. On a sports field you encourage all. You cheer all, you wave the flag for the all, because everyone is encouraged by encouragement.

Constructive encouragement is also amazing. Tonight we had a pretty strong player on our team, who was also strong on telling us when we were doing good, but he also pulled us aside at one point and pointed out some improvements. It was done in such a way that I really wanted to do what he suggested.

Encouragement isn’t vague. The amount of times I’ve been told “your funny” or “your really good at….” with no quantification of why thats a good thing… isn’t as helpful as when people come up and say “Your joy is infectious, and it changes rooms for the better, i like when your around, because it frees me to be me more” That speaks volumes because it is more specific.

I say all that to say this. When Christ calls us to love even our enemy, he doesn’t just call us to say vague niceties instead of punching faces that annoy us. When you watch someone for long enough, you begin to see the God flavours in them. You begin to see their strengths, their callings, their inbuilt puzzle piece for the human race. And we are to call those out of each other.

Use words better.
Strategically, like on the Innabundy court, hilariously like in the midst of a laughing fit and constructively like when we build a house. Edify one another. – To build wisely.

du är stark