The Coca Cola Freestyle machine is much cooler than it looks in the slightly boring video above. Coke has revolutionized the fountain drink machine. Instead of just offering the typical six or eight drinks at your local fast food restaurant, the new machine gives you the choice of a mind-boggling 140 flavors of Coke, Sprite, Vault, Powerade, Fanta, Dasani, and just about every other Coke brand you can imagine.

The Freestyle machine is a jaw-droppingly awesome invention, but I don’t think of it as one that people were really clamoring for. I mean, I never really saw a problem with the fountain drink machine the way it was. It never occurred to me that it could be any better. Someone at Coke, however, saw an opportunity for change. Someone far smarter than me was brave enough to see that just because something has been done successfully the way it has for years does not mean that it can’t be improved. The people at Coke have proven that they are not afraid of change. My parents on the other hand are not as brave.

Are you anybody’s favorite person? Are you the favorite person of anybody? Think about it for a moment. Does anybody think you are the most special person in the world?

Did you ever see that movie “March of the Penguins”? It’s an engaging documentary about the fascinating process penguins go through to have babies. Here’s the gist of it as best as I can remember: the female penguin lays an egg. She then passes the egg over to her husband. He tucks it safely in between his legs. The female then leaves to go on a journey for a few months, leaving the man to take care of the egg (as usual). Penguins live in large colonies, and most of them have babies around the same time, so while all the women are off traveling, the men huddle together to try and keep themselves and their eggs warm in frigid conditions. The penguins rotate on the inside and outside of the huddle so as not to hog the warmest parts. Finally, just when the baby penguin is about to hatch, the mother penguin returns to take care of it.

Here’s the amazing part – the mother penguin just happens to know exactly when her baby is going to hatch. There’s no real explanation how penguins just seem to know when to come back to their babies; they just do it, and have been doing it for as long as anyone knows. It’s like they have some sort of built in radar that tells them just when to come back, even though they’ve never had a baby before. It’s beyond explanation. As Donald Miller puts it in his book Blue Like Jazz, “You’d go crazy trying to explain penguins. It’s best just to watch them and be entertained. I don’t think you can explain how Christian faith works either. It is a mystery. And I love this about Christian spirituality. It cannot be explained, and yet it is beautiful and true. It is something you feel, and it comes from the soul.”

Penguins are a beautiful mystery, and so is our faith in God. Faithfulness is hard to explain, but it is one of the fruits of the spirit, and if we want to be the people God wants us to be, we ought to examine this fruit and figure out how to exhibit it in our lives.

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation. By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.” – Hebrews 11:1-3

Our God is powerful beyond any platitudes we can laud upon Him. His accomplishments are limitless. Though we have not seen many of these accomplishments with our eyes, we have faith in His power. Though we do not see where He is taking us, we ought to have faith in where He is leading us.

Before our discussion of faithfulness, a few of the guys played a game where they had to have faith that their leaders would take care of them. The students had to spin around 25 times while holding a pool stick in their hands and looking at the top of it. Then they had to put the pool stick down, do 3 jumping jacks, and try to jump over the stick. Easier said then done.