The Coach Who Sent Them Out

In 2019, basketball coach Dawn Staley stood before her South Carolina Gamecocks at the end of a grueling practice. She didn't hand them a playbook and say, "Figure it out." She walked onto the court, ran the drills beside them, and then said five words that changed their program: "I'm with you every game." Three years later, they cut down the nets as national champions.

When Jesus stood on that mountain in Galilee and told eleven ordinary, doubt-carrying disciples to go and make disciples of all nations, He wasn't issuing a corporate memo from distant headquarters. He was standing right there — the same Jesus who had cooked fish on the beach, who had walked dusty roads beside them, who bore scars in His hands. And His final promise wasn't "Good luck out there." It was "I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

The disciples didn't leave that mountain with advanced degrees in theology. Some of them still wrestled with doubt even as they worshiped. But they carried something far more powerful than certainty — they carried a commission backed by all authority in heaven and on earth, and the unbreakable promise of the Almighty's presence.

Every baptism we perform, every truth we teach, every step we take into unfamiliar territory — we do it with the same Jesus who refused to send His people out alone. He goes with us. Every game. Every nation. Every day.