Hi again frienddssss
After my last blog, my friend and squad coach Brian sent me something really cool. He said,
“Hey Kylah,
Recently Kylah asked me to write a guest blog and I agreed. I need to admit up front that this makes me a complete hypocrite as I have previously been opposed to guest blogs on the race for reasons I won’t go into here. But this squad is different. Kylah is different. So here goes.
The Path of the Unruly Lamb
My wife Cathy and I are the coaches for GAP X. If GAP X is a church, and it is, then we are the elders.
We were both previously married before Christ and we have six adult children and 6 grandchildren between us. In addition to coaching for AIM we serve as full time missionaries at the IMI City of Refuge children’s home, school, and Christian missions base in Comayagua Honduras. It’s a ministry we supported for over a decade before moving here full time almost three years ago. Before that I was a clinical supervisor for an adolescent substance abuse treatment program in Kauai Hawaii. Apparently after ten years of counseling middle schoolers that no one else wanted to deal with they decided I was qualified to be the boss. Go figure. Meanwhile Cathy was a Licensed Massage therapist at the Grand Hyatt Kauai. For fun we opened a faith based, coed, transitional home for furloughed inmates. Basically, we lived with and discipled between 5-10 technically still incarcerated, inmates for 12 years. Today we are pastors to 54 at risk children with 10-20 more on the way. We also do video production, photography and other media related tasks in support of the ministry. It’s a respectable enough track record I suppose. But that’s not why Kylah asked me to write.
You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. Gen 50:20
Cathy and I don’t begin with our worldly successes when we first introduce ourselves to racers at training camp. Instead we begin with what we desire to cultivate in them. We begin by attempting to model transparency and authenticity. We begin with our own brokenness.
I was four years old when my best friend’s older brother chased me home with a gun with which he said he was going to kill me. The gun wasn’t real of course. But I didn’t know it at the time. I believed I was about to die. When I arrived home, I found the screen door was locked. “Mommy, mommy?” I screamed. “They’re going to kill me! Let me in!” “Oh, go fight your own battles!” she exclaimed. In my mother’s defense she had no clue as to what was happening. She had a rule; you play inside or outside, you don’t track mud in and out all day. As usual I had chosen out. Besides there was no one there when I turned around. What no one understood, least of all me was that the devil used this situation to implant a lie that would shape the course of my life.
“You are alone.” “You’re going to have to fight your own battles.”
I spent more than two decades doing exactly that. I’ll spare you the gory details but suffice it to say that after being on my own since the age of 14 and 20 years of addiction to drugs and alcohol, lost jobs, arrests, alienation from family and friends, a broken marriage and abandoned children, I found myself drunk and facing a man with a shotgun at point blank range. Scores of people had sown and watered gospel seed into me throughout the years seemingly to no avail. In fact, I was what you might call and evangelical atheist full of venom and hate for a cruel and impotent albeit illusory God and His stupid people who refused to save me from myself. I remember thinking, as I stood before that shotgun “That’s it. I’m done!” And I charged at the man screaming “shoot me!” as I ran. All I know is he fired, I saw a blinding white flash and “heard” a thought like a voice in my head,
“this is the last time.”
Honestly, I thought I was dead. I looked up from the ground where I had fallen just in time to see the wide-eyed man with the shotgun running away. When realized I was alive and unharmed, God suddenly became real and I immediately interpreted “this is the last time” as Him saying,
“this is the last time I save your butt. Next time I’m taking you out.”
Now I can’t say for certain why I didn’t get shot. But as a former Marine I know that it’s really hard to miss with a shot gun at point black range and muzzle flashes are never pure white. What I do know for certain is that I encountered the saving grace and love of God that night. After more than two decades of addiction and at least one trying every method and trick I could find to get clean and sober He delivered me in an instant. I’ve never had a desire to drink or use drugs since. It’s been over two decades now. There were several other transformative encounters after that. It was during one of these that He showed me that “this is the last time” was not an expression of His loathing and disgust for me. Rather “this is the last time” meant “this is the last time you fight your own battles. I’ll take it from here.”
He has.
I am told that when shepherds tended sheep in the fields in biblical times; any time an unruly lamb would repeatedly run away the shepherd would break its leg then set the bone and bandage the leg. He’d carry the lamb on his back while it healed. By the time the lamb could walk again it would be so accustomed and attached to the shepherd that it wouldn’t leave his side.
I haven’t.
We all have a story. We all have brokenness in our lives that society encourages to us hide in lieu of presenting the face of wholeness, competence and success. Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with success. But the kingdom of heaven is upside down. His ways are not our ways. His thoughts are not our thoughts. Christianity is a relationship. Relationships are rooted in intimacy and intimacy in vulnerability and truth. That’s why David, a man after God’s own heart did not cry out to Him from a position of pride in his worldly success as King, but in brokenness amidst the worst transgression and failure of his life,
My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.
Psalms 51:17
The older I get the more I understand how utterly and inextricably dependent on Jesus I am. That it is my failures, my identification with the pain of the paupers and the so-called losers in life that reveals who I am, who He is, and qualifies me to declare His goodness and love for us now. The older I get the more I recognize the paradox of being beautifully and wonderfully made while at the same time accepting that my most righteous deeds are like filthy rags. The only remotely good thing about me in a worldly sense is that I was and am breakable. Perhaps the ultimate paradox of this upside-down Kingdom and God whom we serve is that He didn’t conquer evil despite being pierced and crushed. He conquered through it. And while His yoke is easy and His burden light, He gave us the algorithm of brokenness by which we might become intimate with Him and with each other so that, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms. Eph 3:10
There are no coincidences. His ways are higher than our ways. His thoughts are higher than our thoughts. Far higher than we who see as in a glass darkly could possibly hope to comprehend fully even if our limited comprehension is proportional to the amount of time, we have spent on earth seeking Him.
Yet it is not time on earth alone that most qualifies me to be a coach. What qualifies me to shepherd the racers He places in our care, these amazing sons and daughters of God, maybe your sons and daughters, is that I have an intimate knowledge of the path of the unruly lamb. At the end of the day we are all unruly lambs.
Heya– just a fundraising update!! I only have $1,700 left to raise. Y’all have been so so helpful in getting me here– just have to overcome that final push! If you or anyone else is thinking about donating– guess what? It’s tax deductible!
Thank you to everyone for all your encouragement and support! If you’re interested in donating, the button’s up top. As always, I’m sending my love!
-Kylah
