Sports have always held a negative connotation for me. I have had asthma as long as I remember and as a result I struggled at sports growing up. I can’t think of one positive sports moment from when I was a kid. As I got older it became less of an issue because I got better at learning how to avoid them. I started mountain biking and enjoyed that. My asthma got a little better and I learned to push my self more and started actually enjoying some less traditional sports.
After high school, I was able to completely avoid any form of team sports all together, including back yard football games and any thing else that could result in humiliation, because I didn’t know how to play since I
never learned the rules, let alone strategy. I started doing more individual type sports or ones that most people wouldn’t know anything about, like climbing. I never even looked back at any other sports.
never learned the rules, let alone strategy. I started doing more individual type sports or ones that most people wouldn’t know anything about, like climbing. I never even looked back at any other sports.
I hadn’t really thought about the fact that I avoided them, until the World Race. And it turns out, everyone in most other countries in the world plays soccer. So when you can’t talk to them because you speak different
languages then you must play at least once and awhile. After realizing that the only rule that I know is that you can’t use your hands unless your the goalie I continued avoiding it when ever I could. After all the average five-year-old third-world kid is a better player than me. So as you can imagine I was not looking forward to the second week on “Manastery”, which was to consist of playing soccer almost every day and often, more than once a day. Our contact Weelapong (he is a whole blog in himself:) runs a sports ministry and does a lot of different stuff in his community. But his plan for us was to hang out and play a couple times a day and go to school and talk to the kids about Christ. I went into the week looking for some other stuff that needed to get done, maybe fixing up stuff around the house or finding some other needs around the community. Which are all good things but at some point I realized that I was avoiding them. And I was reminded about a conversation that I had had with my girlfriend about letting God redeem Christmas for her instead of avoiding it. I had basically told her that she had at least give Him chance at it. And here I was a week later avoiding something in my life. So I decided to ask God to redeem sports in my life.
So I started participating as much as my body would allow me. We started the first day with running three laps, followed by a little stretching and some sprinting drills and wrapped it up with a game of soccer, just for fun. I almost couldn’t get out of bed the next morning, but decided to keep trying anyway. I kept playing and one evening during one of our games with some the local youth, I found myself almost enjoying it, I mean at least not hating it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still not much of a player and it will probably be sore for a week. But God really did redeem it. It is no longer something I feel like I have to avoid. I don’t know that I will be seeking it out but I am no longer fear the idea of team sports as a rule. What do you fear and avoid that God is waiting to redeem for you? All you have to do is ask and give a chance to do it.
