I’ve just got back into playing basketball after a long hiatus. Many, many years ago I used to be quite good. I then didn’t play for about 10 years – didn’t so much as touch a ball – before I setup a regular game to reach Chinese students somewhile ago. I assumed I’d be a lot slower, quite unfit, but my skills would essentially be there, just rusty. How wrong I was. It was deeply embarrassing. I soon had to wake up to reality: I was just no good anymore. Not just not good, but excruciatingly bad.

Since moving to Oldham, I hadn’t touched a basketball in that time either. So, I’ve had another 10 years of not playing. My daughter has just started. I am convinced she will be much better than I ever was because she is starting out much younger than I did and she will be (thanks to her mother’s genes) relatively tall. But as she began getting back into it, I thought I’d start playing again too. Only this time, I went with more realistic expectations of how good I would be (by which I mean, of course, I expected to be terrible!) Thus it proved to be.

The other thing I forgot about – and I suspect this is only going to get worse and worse – is that not being 18 anymore, the aftermath of playing for the first time having not touched a ball for 10 years is a bit of a killer. I was fine driving home, I was fine walking around the house immediately after playing, I was fine as I had a shower. However, once I sat down and stayed there for a while, my muscles decided to tell me they weren’t, in fact, fine. Everything hurt. The next day was even worse. At the time of writing, I’m a few days on from having played and still walking like bow-legged pig!

I think there are some parallels here with the church. I have mentioned the matter of “church skills” before and won’t rehash what I said there. Suffice to say, much like any sort of sport, you must use them or (as I discovered with basketball) lose them. Unless we keep regularly maintaining the skill (and there are skills involved) of meeting together, one-anothering, sharing life together and caring for people we will simply lose our skills. That is to say nothing of the ordinary, ongoing need to welcome people and keep the practicalities of church life running. We must take serious the need to use them or lose them.

We also need to beware the issues associated with a return after a hiatus. The truth is, the longer you’re away from church the harder it will be to come back. The muscles and skills that you once exercised regularly will have settled into a new mode of existence. Trying to crank the gears and get yourself going again will not necessarily be like riding a bike. There will be skills you once had that simply aren’t there any more. Even those things you have retained, you will find them much harder and less natural now. Worse, you may even begin to feel some significant pain after the first few times of using them again.

Nevertheless, as with any sport you come back to, it does get better! The pains you feel after the early goes begin to subside and become less painful. The skills you haven’t used for many years slowly begin to come back. The more you exercise them, the stronger you get, the more natural they feel and the less you need to recover after putting them into practice.

Of course, the better way is not to take a hiatus at all. If we don’t quit playing in the first place we’ll not have the wrench of starting again. But if we have been away, though we may have to come to terms with things feeling quite different for a time and our being much less good at all the associated stuff than we once were, over time these things will fade away. We will settle back into the old skills, we’ll begin to feel more natural, we’ll not be in pain every time we exercise them but will increasingly find less need for lengthy recovery every time.

I know I have mentioned this before fairly recently, but I mention it again because it is on my mind having just returned to sports myself. And as much pain as I am in moving about right now, as I am suffering the consequences of having not played for a decade, as I embarrass myself with my ineptitude, it is a good reminder to me NOT to do the same to my church life. But it bears saying, if anybody does, there is always a way back. If even a fat, increasingly old man like me can still somehow manage to cope playing basketball again – even if it is hard to get going again right now – there is surely a way back into church life for those who have been away. We shouldn’t pretend it won’t be tough getting back into it (a reminder to those of us in the church not to let it slide), but it is possible and it won’t remain hard forever if you stick with it.