Fresh Ice.... 5th Installment, Magpies
May 19, 2009
Fresh Ice As I walked into the stadium I could hear the hum of the generators below the 2500 seats. I had driven for an hour in the swallowing void of Saturday morning. It was now a little after five thirty and my silent entry was being invaded by the sounds of others descending to my temple. The lights were off but I could still see the reflection of the ice from the rim of wooden boundaries. I wondered if the original intent of the barrier was to keep the puck from injuring the spectators or to keep the ravenous fans from injuring the players. Spitfire Arena was an “Old school” hockey stadium. More than just a few great names had stepped onto this ice. I loved the sense of sharing history here.
As I pushed open the door to the dressing room my ears honed in on the tearing of tape coming off the rolls and my nose was assaulted with that strange mixture of cold and rot. No hockey player would ever wash their own equipment. Leather, soaked with sweat, practice jerseys thrown back in the bags after last weeks’ game and the acrid aroma of stale beer had stained the air of this room for decades. I like the smell. As I sat on the bench, I caught the casual nods of my buddies. Few words here: Just preparation for an early morning war.
I pulled on my armor, a strange compilation of equipment assembled much like Johnny Cash’s Cadillac; “one piece at a time… didn’t cost me a dime”. I taped on the pieces that had missing straps and finally, after lacing up my skates and pulling my jersey down over my pads, picked up my gloves and stick, patted my helmet into place and walked down the corridor toward the rink. There has always been a small excitement for me as I get to the ice. The Zamboni had left a sheen on the surface of the rink. I was the first person there.
The rink door, out of the players’ bench chunked open, and I gently stepped onto the translucent freeze. My blades were razor sharp and slit the new ice skin easily. A few warming strides and I dug in. The ice and steel combined for their familiar ripping rhythm. By the end of our game this piece of manufactured ice would be shredded and abused, but now it was virgin territory. No one else had ever skated on this surface. I am spiritually connected with all of the players, somehow, who have slid across this man-made pond. It reconnects me to the frozen ponds in St. Catharines, Ontario, and the ten boys that would race there after school to play hockey until dark. This ice is a gesture. It is a past dream and a future hope. I still romance about the first strides onto new ice.
Our life on “The Farm” certainly has been an unmarked sheet of ice. Each stride has left a curvaceous streak across our pond. There have also been many times when we have had to wait while God freezes the pond. Each step we have taken has come as a result of incredible forethought and diligence. Our original business plan to reach rural students was over seventy pages. No one was going to tell me we weren’t prepared. The only real problem we faced was how to start accomplishing it all. We were going to have to make some of it up on the fly.
We knew that God had called us and confirmed that call through answered prayer. Now we had to roll up our sleeves and do… ummm… something. We determined that raising support and praying would be our first step. I don’t know if we realized that they would become our constant path or not. Those first days, armed with a pipe dream and a “not so succinct” presentation about what God wanted us to do, I began to make visits. I talked to businesspersons, friends, pastors and students. I would go wherever there was warmth. It was lonely.
I would drive to Hillsdale County for these meetings, sometimes, with nothing more than a lead on a potentially interested person, and think, “Are you really going to do this Lord?” I would have set up a meeting with a person who smiled at me. I needed the encouragement.
Self doubt was my companion on those trips. I could talk about the vision, show people the packet and ask them to watch the video, but I still struggled with the sense that I was making it all up. I was afraid that somebody might unveil me to be a fraud. I fought with the nagging question, “Am I a fake or am I naive?” It wasn’t that I doubted God. It was that I wasn’t sure He had selected the right person for this job. I knew that I was not a great man. Only great men launch things. I was not that man. I would remind myself of the stories of David and Goliath, Gideon and the Midianites, Moses and the Red Sea and Peter and the first sermon. And then, I would despair. Who was I kidding? God was able to do whatever He wanted, but this venture was a house of cards.
Some days, I would meet with two people in the morning and then try to set up appointments in the afternoon. Failure after failure would occasionally reduce me to sitting in my car in this countrified place, hours from home and the security of what I knew I had done well over the last fifteen years. I wasn’t aware of the work that God was doing during those times. It felt to me that he was failing. The truth is that He was molding us, Dawn and I, instead. He was forging. The dross of self-reliance was being burned away. It was the death of a salesman.
There is an overriding truth in these things that God calls us to do. He is doing something to us, and that seems to be far more important to Him than our assigned tasks. It makes sense right? This God, who took just six days to create all that we see and know in the physical world, who washed sin from the earth with a storm in one year, who pushed back the Red sea into a canyon of liquid in mere minutes, always spends more time developing the servant. He doesn’t need us to do stuff. He wants us to love him.
Moses took years in the Sinai desert to become what God desired. Paul was a student for 13 years after his conversion and before his tour of duty. When God grabbed David off of the field, it wasn’t because God needed his slingshot. He was interested in creating a king out of shepherd material. God didn’t take Gideon because he wanted a horn player. He was making a field general. He didn’t need help pushing over a few pillars when he used Samson. He was building a case for his grace. God is more about making people, than He is about building stuff and accomplishing tasks. He always has been.
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