Air Jordan & acceptance.....huh?

Whoa! 2 posts in 2 days...can you actually believe it?! this time i might actually say more than just random ramblings :) as you may or may not know, i have recently read Rob Bell's Velvet Elvis (i actually read it before bek!i don't think i have ever read a book before her!) and there has been a thought that has really stuck with me over the last month. it's the part where Rob Bell talks about the fact that the disciples of Jesus would of been people who had already been rejected to be disciples of another rabbi and that in Jesus calling them to follow Him he is kind of sending out a message that all are able to be His disciples, not just the spiritually elite - sorry if that sounds really confusing!(Check out the NOOMA dvd 'DUST' which also deals with this thought).
Anyway, i got to thinking what the disciples would of actually felt when Jesus called them in this context. if your not familiar, Jewish men would spend the majority of their youth studying and learning off by heart the Old Testament - all of it - and would then go before a rabbi and he would say "come follow me" if he thought the kid was made of the right stuff, or he would say"go work in your family's business" (or something like that) if they weren't good enough. so the disiciples then had already been rejected and "banished" to the family business when Jesus turns up. imagine that, spending your entire youth devoted to learning something and then being told your not good enough. imagine how rejected they must of felt. but then Jesus comes and says that they can do that which they were rejected from, they can be disciples, in fact they can be the direct disciples of God himself!that's pretty cool.
this got me thinking about what this might look like today. obviously we in the western world miss a lot of that background stuff and the call of Christ to follow him then loses impact on us as we haven't felt the sting of rejection from that calling already and the incredible acceptance that Christ is offering through the call to follow Him. so i thought about what i spent my youth (oh so long ago that was!) devoted to.
i was mad on basketball. i played it from the age of 5 right through to the end of year 12. at times i would be training 2-3 times a week as well as playing 2 games a week. it occupied a lot of my time and i thought i was pretty good at it. i then tried out for a basketball scholarship going into year 8 expecting to hear the call of the program saying "come follow me" but instead i was told i wasn't good enough. for me, this sort of rejection in my life is the closest i can parellel to the rejection of the disciples when they were young.
i then got to thinking what my "Jesus" figure would of been in this instance......all i could think of was Michael Jordan. that's right, i thought of Air Jordan himself, coming to me in my current fittness state (which isn't that good i can tell you) and saying "hey i want you on my team, come follow me". as crazy as that scenario is, i can imagine how significant that call would be, how accepted i would feel after that and how hard i would want to work for and devoted i would be to M.J himself for the oppotunity. i guess my question is, what is your rejection and what would your "Jesus" look like in that circumstance? because i feel that it has been helpful for me to reflect on this just to gain a little more insight and understanding to the acceptance that Christ offers us in the midst of a world that is telling us we are not good enough.
that's my rant for the day.i hope i haven' t confused or bored you and made you never want to come back again.....because if that's the case i think i mite have one very unhappy co-author living in the same house as me!
God bless!