August 28, 2013
Taking the Shot
On Fox News I watched
an interview with Jack Taylor, the young man who scored 138 individual points
in a basketball game. Overwhelmingly
breaking the previous record Jack acknowledged the Lord and then he said, “It was as though I couldn’t miss. Even when
I was off balance a little, I still made the shot.” I can just imagine
young David sharing similar thoughts after he toppled Goliath. I sometimes miss
the fearlessness of youth…no doubt the Lord misses it in me too. “All those gathered here will know that it
is not by sword or spear that the LORD saves; for the battle is the LORD’s, and
he will give all of you into our hands.” (1 Sam 17:47 NIV)
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Gail;
-----I don’t miss the fearlessness of youth! Whenever I tried to join the horseplay of my friends, someone got hurt. I would’ve rather it been me, but it was always someone else. So I stopped horseplaying. Then beyond that, whether it be falling from a haystack headfirst, from the top of a backstop back first, bouncing my head off the concrete in a bicycle race, or averting by the tips of my fingers personally plugging up a sucking culvert at the bottom of a lake, my youth was neither graceful nor pretty. I eventually learned that if I tried I would fail, most often painfully. And if I didn’t fail, then good fortune would extend only so far as my first attempt. I didn’t identify with Superman or Batman or Captain America. Mine were Sad Sack and The Born Loser. That merely touches upon the happenstance of my young life. My idiocy and foolishness is a mass of yarn much larger.
-----So one would expect my attitude to be totally worthless. The day I averted by the tips of my fingers the plugging of a lake’s drainpipe, I sat on the edge of that weir-box and thought very carefully about the followablility of my Dad’s instructions, which I followed not, and about how every corner of my life turns up the bad more naturally than the good. I realized I needed to be more investigative and respecting of possibilities than most people because the happenstance part of my life was more in tune with the decay part of nature than with the budding part.
-----Then for what would a person want to trudge through a life wherein bad luck always awaited his choices like a tiger crouching in grass? When I fell off the backstop, my friends drug me into the school building because I couldn’t move my legs. I walk fine now and run fine too. When I fell off the haystack I hit the ground completely headfirst. Necks have broken at far less. I slapped my head against concrete, against a roller-skating floor, against the Marine Road pavement at 40mph, and was driven to my knees by a 4 inch pole applied at the top of my skull, and yet most who know me don’t know me to be too much goofier than average. I would shiver at the thought of it all if I wasn’t so marveling at the Lord’s care in bringing me through it all.
-----By all the blunders and errors and accidents and fool antics of my idiotic adventures, I have struck gold. My mishappenstance inspires me to dig harder and mine deeper for life’s wisdom so I might be able to survive my own foolishness and stupidity as well as overcome a bit of simple bad luck. Life isn’t about how well or not you can do things, or have done, or will do things. It isn’t about how much you’ve gotten or will get or will loose or never will have. It is about abiding in the moment of the time-at-hand with thanksgiving to God that He loves you like we might consider to be insanely. It is about bridging that moment to the next moment with all due care and consideration for Jesus Christ, His Father's instructions, and everyone else whom your actions might effect. It is about how safe and secure and joyful every situation of life is when even death will sweep His children into bliss forever. Regardless of how tragic and messed up can be a moment of life, or even all of a life’s moments, the fact that God is perfectly good and loving and intimately caring about every last quark of all existence makes this moment the starting place for better ones, if by no less reason than that if He did not think some good of it could become for you, He would not have allowed you to be in it. The moment passes; His children don’t, nor does their certainty of eternal joys. I’ll score being His child against 138 points in any game! I perceive Jack would, too. Maybe that's why he hit 138.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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