I do not bleed blue. Far from it.

But it is the baseball off-season still, and I am hungry enough for the game that I opened the pages of Clayton and Ellen Kershaw's new book, Arise. May I say this? It may make you forget all about Tim Tebow.

What the Kershaws have done, with the assistance of Ellen's sister, Ann Higginbottom, is deliver the strongest statement on identity in Christ I have ever read from a Christian athlete. I don't know whether one or another among the three is really the theologian in the group, but when a Cy Young Award winner signs off on a book this articulate in expressing the beliefs and actions of faith in Jesus, you have a guy who is not afraid of his platform.

And platform is what I am far more interested in tackling here than Arise itself. The question of platform is one that has invited debate in recent considerations of Christian professional athletes. One critic of the concept suggests that platform isn't far enough away from the idea of pedestal--and we know what happens too, too often to those who get put or put themselves on a pedestal. Bells and whistles and red flags make a parade through the discerning part of my brain when Christian sports fans clamor loudly for a player to step up and speak of Jesus after a victory. Rarely would we be bold enough to thrust 20- or even 30-somethings into maturity-required leadership in our local churches, but we want these same young stars to make big statements for Jesus in front of national audiences. It's not as easy as all that.

Sports and Christianity have been linked since New Testament times. The apostle Paul encouraged first century believers to "run in such a way as to get the prize" (1 Corinthians 9:24). In the twenty centuries since then, countless numbers of athletes from various sports have taken Paul's advice quite literally, both on and off the field of play, and many have openly acknowledged their belief in Christ.

In fact, there are an astonishing number of professional atheletes who are publicly professing their faith in one way or another. And two of them--Tim Tebow, quarterback of the Denver Broncos, and Los Angeles Doger pitching ace Clayton Kershaw--are getting a lot of attention from the media, albeit for different reasons. These two 23-year-olds are also demonstrating that there's no "one size fits all" approach to telling the watching world that you're a Christian.