The Overflow Principle
WARNING! reading this may make you feel overly charitable…
Give. Go Be a Blessing.
One of the things that is close to our heart as a club is to foster an atmosphere of pouring into others. The overflow principle: when you are full to overflowing, the atmosphere around you receives the fruit of your extra. Sometimes that happens almost by accident! And other times, we want to get really intentional.
At the last tournament of our season, where three of our teams were finishing up the year, we decided to go all-in on some gift giving. The idea: let’s congratulate the players on opposing teams for a great season, and close out the year by personally handing a gift to someone we don’t know. This is who we are- we want to be a club focused on giving, rather than receiving. We wanted to put some action to what we had been talking about during the season, and overflow the care, attention and blessing that the Lord gives each of us by giving to another. (insert: “my cup overflows” - Psalm 23:5)
Well… many many crazy interactions resulted! Who knew that this would be so counter-cultural as to cause confusion, and even misunderstanding! LOL! People are really not accustomed to receiving gifts at a volleyball tounament! I loved watching our 14 year olds each give a goodie bag to an opposing player at the receiving line before a game. the total confusion on the faces of the other team were almost comical! Then, after giving some out more randomly, we had one player come up to us to give it back, telling us we made a mistake- it must be for someone else. And, finally, my favorite head-scratcher is when some of our players overheard another team saying “this is the club who’s trying to recruit us”. Wait, what?!?! Ha! (that team is from the other corner of town, so… not exactly what I thought would be the takeaway!).
the lesson, i think, is that unexpected giving is sometimes a foreign concept, and will illicit some very unexpected responses! I had no idea it was this foreign! this made me smile and laugh, and totally want to do this again and again! and, eventually, they will just know us for the gifts, which hopefully point to the father- the giver of all good gifts.