Dying is depressing.
But the Apostle Paul said, “To die is gain.”
If the author of two thirds of the New Testament said that, there has to be some validity in that statement.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of “dying daily” lately and realizing what that has looked like in my life. Something that happened last week can help illustrate this concept in my life pretty well. But first, let’s travel back in time.
When I was in 6th grade, I was your average middle-schooler with extremely low self-esteem and greatly lacking in the friends department. I was a subject to bullies and couldn’t quite find my place to fit in. Until one day, I saw something that would change my future forever.
I was sitting in class when a group of classmates were looking at a skateboarding catalog. I had never seen anything like it before. When I got home from school, immediately I ordered my very own catalog. When it arrived, I would dream of riding every different board, doing all the tricks I saw the pros doing in the pictures, and skating with the kids who I saw looking at the catalog in the first place.
Only one problem…
I didn’t know the first thing about skateboarding.
All I knew is that it looked cool and I was desperate to make friends. My thought was, “Maybe if I skateboarded, those guys will think I’m cool and want to be my friend.”
In a sense, I was peer pressured into skateboarding.
I got my first skateboard for Christmas that year and spent every waking moment outside on my driveway, trying to learn new tricks. I progressed quickly and when the other kids noticed this, we become friends even quicker.
The dream of most skateboarder’s would be to get good enough to become sponsored and become pro. You could get free stuff and make money doing what you love:
What’s not to like about that!?
My friends and I would skate non-stop, learn new tricks, and film our “sponsor-me tapes”.
But as much as I tried on my own strength to get sponsored, however, it would never happen.
Around this time, I had given my life to Jesus. When I was going to youth group, I would hear these messages about “dying to yourself” and “giving your gifts unto the Lord”. All I could think of was two things:
#1. I don’t want to die!
#2. Christian skateboarding? Doesn’t make sense
I was stubborn and didn’t want to “give skateboarding to God”.
For one, I didn’t know what that would look like.
And two, I’ve never heard of skateboarding and Jesus going hand in hand.
My thoughts were:
If I gave skateboarding to Jesus, my dream would die.
I would never get sponsored.
I’d never be a pro.
No one will notice what I’m doing.
I’ll go nowhere.
I began skating in the basement of a church in a makeshift skatepark around that time. The Underground Skatepark. This was my first introduction to skate ministry.
I loved skateboarding and I loved Jesus, so it seemed like a good fit. I still saw both things are two separate entities however and could not rationalize how they’d cooperate together in my life.
Eventually, a skate team did a demo at the park and I learned they were a Christian Skate team. I didn’t know such a thing existed.
Little by little, I kept seeing the ways God was tugging on my heart.
“Die to yourself”
“Give your gift unto the Lord”
“Skatepark in a church”
“Christian skate team”
Okay God I think I’m getting the hints.
I began hanging out and skating with some of the guys on the team and learned more about what ‘skate ministry’ really was.
My ego slowly began to crumble.
I started to let go of my desires and ambitions. Not because I felt hopeless. But because I realized I was putting so much importance on things that conflicted with my faith such as pride, money, etc.
SKATEBOARDING WAS MY GOD.
But now, Jesus had come to the forefront of my desires.
I died to myself.
I said, “God, I’ve had my own story mapped out, but I am handing it over to you finally.”
My story was now in the hands of the Master Author.
Not long after I gave in to the incessant nagging of Jesus, a contest was about to go down at the local skatepark.
In hindsight, this is my most memorable moment in my spiritual formation (besides simply my testimony).
I entered in the Advanced contest and in the Best Trick contest. Things just clicked during the normal contest which was an amazing feeling, but the Best Trick contest was what I’ll never forget.
Everyone skates at the same time, on the same obstacle in the park for 10 minutes straight and has to throw down (you guessed it) their best trick. Everyone was going at it so hard! Tricks I’ve never seen done at the park before were all happening. Something got into me to try a certain trick I’ve never done before (and since that day I’ve never done it ever again). In the final 30 seconds, I pulled off a kickflip to backside tailslide down a ledge (if you don’t know what that is, just know it looked cool).
As I rolled away, I’ll never forget how loud the place got. The euphoria I felt. It was unreal. In that moment, I had every emotion in the world that gave me a high which I’m sure no drug could ever compare too. It was then and there, I learned I had won both contests. And then the moment that changed everything happened. The team manager from the Christian skate team (Freedom skateboards) came up to me and threw a shirt at me and told me:
“Congrats man, you’re on the team”
(my first team pic for Freedom Skateboards)
I wasn’t skating for myself or my own dreams and desires anymore.
I only wanted to skate for Jesus and have fun with him while I was out there.
In making Him my focus, doors began to open.
When I skated with my own agenda:
I had fun, but I never went anywhere.
Since that day, of giving my skateboarding to Jesus, it led to traveling around doing skate demos, school assemblies, and music festivals, telling people everywhere about Jesus, what He has done in my life, and what He can do in their lives too. It even led to being hooked up by other Christian skate teams.
All of this has taken me from the East Coast to the West Coast. From my little town in PA to Africa, Central America, and now…the whole world.
When I brought my skateboard on the World Race, I didn’t know what I would do with it. I would be in countries with broken gravel, dirt roads, no skateparks…basically nowhere to skate.
But God has told me to use this gift to preach the gospel everywhere I go, so I brought it.
Africa gave me 3 months of no skating, but Bulgaria provided me with a HUGE fill me up in the form of a skatepark! God had provided me a chance to worship Him with this gift and that inspired me a ton. After such a high and refreshment of skating, God stirred something up on my heart.
This is my favorite little 5 year old I’ve met on the World Race, Ben. He was the son of a family we met in Bulgaria. His family invited us for tacos during our last night in Sofia, and he had asked me to bring my skateboard so we could ride together.
He had a super tiny ‘Spider-man’ board that couldn’t turn very well and I could tell it was a struggle for him. I let him try my board instead, showing him how to stand on it, push, and turn.
He was living!
Ben picked it up so quick and so fearlessly!
We went back inside for tacos after riding and that was when I heard the Holy Spirit…
“You know what to do…”
We ate our tacos, listened to some nostalgic tunes from high school days, and lived it up one last time with our new friends. Then it came time for our goodbyes.
I told Ben, if he helped me with a trick outside, I’d give him a surprise.
I had Ben lay down on the ground so I could jump over him on my skateboard. The brave little dude got up, super excited that I didn’t land on him, and wondered what the surprise was.
“This is for you buddy”
I handed over my skateboard to Ben that day.
Speechless, he took the board from me and gave me a big hug.
Seeing him ride my board that day and how his face brightened up with joy as he rode it, confirmed for me:
This is the reason why I brought my board on the race.
God asks us to use our gifts to honor Him and to bless others.
That day, it meant giving a new gift to a little boy in Bulgaria.
Who knows, maybe this is the first seed to be planted for him to one day travel the world and preach JC to everyone he meets.
I’ve been reading “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years” by Donald Miller, again. The main focus of it being that we are all characters in the big story God is writing. It makes me wonder:
What kind of a story am I writing?
Similarly, I just watched the movie “Stranger than Fiction” where the hero of the story realizes that he too is just a character being written by an author. At one point, he learns that he is going to die. Then he is told, after his mentor/counselor reads the ending of his story:
“You HAVE to die…it’s a masterpiece.”
It made me think…
“My story would have sucked if I never died (to myself)”
We can write our own story, but it’s nothing compared to the story God wants to write for us.
My story would just be “ehh” if it was:
“I grew up skating to become a professional but it didn’t work out so now I’m sitting around eating bagel bites, bitter about my life because things didn’t work out how I planned.”
Instead, I had to die to make the story better. Now it says:
“I had a dream for myself to one day make a name for myself but I knew God had a bigger plan. I gave my skateboarding to Him and he opened the doors to sponsors, traveling, preaching, praying for many, seeing people healed, seeing miracles, encouraging the broken, meeting amazing people, and willingly giving up the thing most precious to me to a little boy with a dream of his own.”
This was not the story I wanted to write.
It’s better.
And it’s far from over.
