Saturday, September 2, 2023

US Open Tennis thoughts

 Just little thoughts about my past:






Where do you find the stamina?

Where does endurance come from?

How do you finish the match, when the crowd is against you, the score is against you and it seems all of your best attempts seem to fall flat?


I watched a match last week and I was rooting for the underdog in that match.  I could really relate to her.  I don’t always root for the underdog.  The other young lady was not the most skilled player, but her conditioning was clearly superior, which is why she won.  I tuned in in the very beginning of the third set.  It had been 2 and a half hours of grueling tennis.  I love those kind of matches, although I haven’t three hours to devote to engaging my attentions to one match, unless it is a final of some grand slam.  This was a qualifier match for the Open, hardly worth my attention usually.  God had some sutures to apply to some open gaping wounds in my soul, that I hadn’t even noticed.


Hallelujah, for his attention to detail.  This little girl may never play another match and her ministry to my soul would have been worth the humiliation of her loss.  I owe her a debt of gratitude.


My first memory of a long match was a three hour grueling match against a formidable women at Rochdale.   For weeks before the match, my father prepped me for a loss.  You can’t practice as much as she is practicing, he said.  You have school and so you might get a game or two.  Minimizing my expectation was my father’s go to coaching style.  He was a very young thirty something father of skilled athletic women and he was very proud of that status.


He had learned the power of persuasion from a doting, devoted quintuplet crew.  I, perhaps more than they all.  


The match came amidst many other responsibilities of freshman year at a new school.  A brisk September, Saturday morning tourney match came upon us.  My very first new can of balls.  The investment of each match.  Pop, fizz and that intoxicating freshness and greening of your mind and olfactory nerves is always exhilarating.  I will never grow tired of that level of expectation.  40 something years later the sense of anticipation seems to still linger.  We didn’t play 3 sets, we played a 9 game single set.  It took 3 long hours for us to wrestle and crawl out from under the smoke of our entanglement.  I had won.  I could hardly believe it.  I had beat my most formidable foe.  A real woman and I at 14 had triumphed.  My muscles and body felt wrung out, but my ambition had received a great and huge boost that would carry me through many battles won and lost over the high school season of play and growth.  


Had I lost, perhaps my ambitions would have been more tempered.   I can’t imagine that.  


The young lady in the match that I saw the other night took me to that inevitability of having lost that match.  I felt as though I had lost and several times I did lose, but perhaps if I had lost that match, I might have gone in another direction of life altogether.  My father would have been right in his estimation of my skill set and perhaps I would have tried some other expression of life skills, completely.  Who can tell?


Sunday, August 27, 2023

As we continue the College Quest!!!

 What are we learning in this world of higher education?  Is it against the will of God to use the means at hand to progress and to engage our culture, for our profit and for our usefulness in the world in which we live?  Does God want me to engage the world with the grace of God or retreat and hide from fear of the seepage of it’s indelible ink on my soul?


God is greater and can handle me in my engagement with the culture.  I believe that there is nowhere that I can go that is apart from his ability to rescue me from others or from myself.  Pastor preached against the leaven of sin in the believer’s life.  What defiles us, truly keeps us from deeper intimacy with Christ.  Asking God to keep us from the ungodliness of our culture is truly a Danielic task.  Other cultures seem to take their religion so much more seriously than we do.  They have outward adornments and they have feasts and things that everyone has to accommodate and we feel very diminished, because for the most part, Christianity has built our economy around our feasts and life.  It doesn’t seem special in comparison.   

It is, though and it doesn’t make our religion less special because we have built our lives around it.  Christmas, Sundays, Easter, etc., are beautiful and beautifying experiences that draw us into a deeper relationship with the very one who made and sustains the world! Hallelujah!  We needn’t make ourselves obnoxious and notorious for not engaging or interacting with the godlessness of the idolatrous around us.  Our God is in control,  the gods of the nations are the distraction of this world.  The idolatry of worldliness is offensive and stinky, but we know that God is greater.   

Who do we serve?  Why are we learning in an ungodly environment?  Can I stand, with all of these temptations and differences rubbing shoulders with me?

I most certainly can!  God is greater and he empowers me to do all things for his glory!  I can learn and represent Christ even in the midst of  an ungodly university around me.  I mustn’t get disappointed, when those who represent religion show no mercy for the torrents of sin that attack.  They shoot us by ridicule for choosing to represent Christ in an uncomfortable position,ie, sports, and arts and other unusual circumstances.   A man in the sports arena, is never assumed to be a heathen, but a woman, no question, she is a heathen.  That isn’t true.   We love Him because he first loved us and he will love us through this difficulty as well!

Lord, I trust you with my soul!  Lord, I trust you with my mind!  College is no match for your omnipotence and so I engage the world in which we live, with a victorious and expectant attitude for you to glorify yourself in my experiences.  For the Glory of Christ Jesus and for the betterment of his church in our age! Amen


Sunday, July 23, 2023

Monday, January 16, 2023

"Don't plant butterflies!"

"Don't plant butterflies!"
Ezra At School 2008

Bear books I'm fond of

  • Winnie the Pooh, Corduroy, Paddington Bear, The Francis series.

Finally!

Finally!
First Day of Kindergarten