BOLDNESS

This is so sweet. I had to share!

Let's be BOLD together.

*Inmate Football*

* There was an unusual high school football game played in Grapevine,
Texas . The game was between Grapevine Faith Academy and the Gainesville
State School . Faith is a Christian school and Gainesville State School
is located within a maximum security correction facility.*

*Gainesville State School has 14 players. They play every game on the road.
Their record was 0-8. They've only scored twice. Their 14 players are
teenagers who have been convicted of crimes ranging from drugs to assault to
robbery. Most had families who had disowned them. They wore outdated, used
shoulder pads and helmets. Faith Academy was 7-2. They had 70 players, 11
coaches, and the latest equipment.*



*Chris Hogan, the head coach at Faith Academy , knew the Gainesville team
would have no fans and it would be no contest, so he thought, What if half
of our fans and half of our cheerleaders, for one night only, cheered for
the other team? He sent out an email to the faithful asking them to do
just that. Heres the message I want you to send, Hogan wrote. You‚Äre
just as valuable as any other person on the planet.



*Some folks were confused and thought he was nuts. One player said, Coach,
why are we doing this? Hogan said, Imagine you dont have a home life, no
one to love you, no one pulling for you. Imagine that everyone pretty much
had given up on you. Now, imagine what it would feel like and mean to you
for hundreds of people to suddenly believe in you.

*The idea took root. On the night of the game, imagine the surprise of
those 14 players when they took the field and there was a banner the
cheerleaders had made for them to crash through. The visitors stands were
full. The cheerleaders were leading cheers for them. The fans were calling
them by their names. Isaiah, the quarterback-middle linebacker said, I
never in my life thought I would hear parents cheering to tackle and hit
their kid. Most of the time, when we come out, people are afraid of us. You
can see it in their eyes, but these people are yelling for us. They knew
our names.



*Faith won the game, and after the game the teams gathered at the 50-yard
line to pray. Thats when Isaiah, the teenage convict-quarterback surprised
everybody and asked if he could pray*. *he prayed, Lord, I dont know
what just happened so I don‚t know how or who to say thank you to, but I
never knew there were so many people in the world who cared about us. On
the way back to the bus, under guard, each one of the players was handed a
burger, fries, a coke, candy, a Bible, and an encouraging letter from the
players from Faith Academy .*

*What an incredible act of Christian witness and kindness and goodness that
was. Proverbs 11:17 says, Your own soul is nourished when you are
kind.‚Proverbs 3:27 says, Do not withhold good when it is in your
power to act.
*