Touch, Stand, and Kneel
It's sort of like Punt, Pass, and Kick--but less competitive and more contemplative
Groundbreaking athletes always inspire me. I devour stories of women (and men, too) whose strength, determination, and courage have taken them to extremes unimaginable by armchair mortals like me. Just a few weeks ago, in fact, I devoted much of a post to Jasmin Paris, the first woman to finish the grueling Barkley Marathons. And don’t even get me started on the Olympics—winter or summer, any sport, any nation—I love it all.
I coulda been a contender
I used to consider myself an athlete back in the day. I grew up big and strong and coordinated, with a heart for competition, a brain for mechanics, and a work ethic that refused to quit.
Remember the NFL-sponsored youth program, “Punt, Pass & Kick”? I spent hundreds of hours, perhaps thousands, practicing these skills in my yard. Thousands more hours in the yard were devoted to soccer skills. And thousands more were spent playing catch with a baseball or softball, or fielding grounders and fly balls. In my spare time, I rode my bike up to the school playground to shoot hoops. Despite some early raw potential, though, I didn’t have a lot of opportunities to take sports very seriously—beyond the front yard—in my younger years. By the time I had the chance to play competitively, I was in high school, too late to catch up to those who had been doing it all along.
By my senior year in high school, I concluded sports wouldn’t be putting me through college, as I had assumed earlier on.
Time Out
SIDE NOTE: I had to compete at something, so my senior year I turned my attention to competitive public speaking—a skill I figured would serve me well in life, regardless of my declining physical prowess over the decades. I was right.
My high school speech coach was the legendary June Garner (who also coached comedian Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias) at Woodrow Wilson High School.
And yes, this is the same Wilson featured in the 2007 Hilary Swank movie, The Freedom Writers, based on a true story that occurred a few years after I graduated. As you can imagine, a movie set at MY school, about a resilient and inspirational teacher who encouraged her students to write, is going to be a favorite of mine.
Here’s a preview:
Here’s the whole movie, if you have some time and want to be inspired:
Although I myself dropped out of competitive sports fairly early1, I am still inspired by outstanding athletes. I don’t go out of my way to watch sports on TV or read sports magazines, though, so occasionally I stumble upon a player I’ve never heard of before, someone I missed over the years.
The hero I never knew
Kendra Wecker of Kansas was only six years old when I graduated from high school, so she was never a hero of mine back then. But had one of us been able to somehow time travel, she would have been an absolute inspiration to me.
Kendra played all the sports growing up—volleyball, softball, track and field. She led her high school basketball team to an undefeated season culminating in the Kansas state championship her senior year—being named an All-American in the process.
Her powerful throwing arm allowed her to compete internationally for the United States, winning a world championship as a javelin thrower.
She was a dominating force for Kansas State University’s women’s basketball program in the early 2000s, being named to the All Big-12 First Team three out of four years. Her senior year, she was the Big 12’s Player of the Year and, 20 years later, is still listed among the best of the best in Kansas Wildcat history.
Upon graduation in 2005, Kendra was selected fourth overall in the first round of the WNBA draft. Tragically, she suffered a devastating injury in the first game of her first season with the WNBA and never made it back to her original position of dominance on the court, but she worked for many years after that helping to develop other players. Her love of the sport has never died.
But do you know what really got my attention about Kendra Wecker? This. Take a moment to watch this short video from a 1995 newscast:
At 12 years old, Kendra Wecker was a lot like me—playing sports with the boys on a snowy Midwestern school playground, or with her dad and siblings in the yard at home. Only she was much better than I ever was. She was what I aspired to be back then.
Same drive, different goals
These days, in my mid-50s, I’m no longer an athlete. I destroyed my throwing arm in the speed pitch booth at a minor league baseball park one summer about fifteen years ago (but not before I won several sets of free tickets for us, haha). It has never recovered. One of my knees refuses to cooperate every time I renew my efforts to become a runner. Blah. My body is not exactly falling apart yet, but it definitely can’t do what it used to do.
Nowadays, I’m focused on humbler fitness goals: balance, flexibility, endurance, overall strength. All of these things are important for our life of travel, so I try to stay in relatively good shape, as much as I can. After all, walking up six flights of stairs with a backpack is not for the faint of heart, literally. And do I even have to articulate what is required to successfully use an Asian “squatty potty,” particularly after a fresh mango smoothie?
It’s been a few years since Punt, Pass, and Kick, but physical fitness is as vital to me now in my mid-50s as it was back then—even though I’m no longer trying to compete as an athlete. But beyond exercising my muscles to stay in shape for the life I want to lead, I’m trying to be extra careful of who and what I touch, where I stand, and where I kneel.
Touch
I remember in the earliest days of COVID—the really early days, before it became a political controversy, way back when we didn’t know much about how it was transmitted and how dangerous it was. I recall suddenly being very aware of who and what I was touching. Other peoples’ hands, surfaces, groceries from the store—when my hands touched something, anything, I felt it. I noticed. Remember how much hand soap (and lotion, subsequently) we went through? I don’t recall ever being so aware of what and who I was touching.
Now, I’m aware of who I am touching in a different way. (Not like THAT.) I pay attention to my words now, both verbal and written. They matter. They carry meaning. They impact people for better or for worse.
My words go out into the furthest reaches of the digital world and—just like an Irish Setter I once owned—after they’ve been unleashed, they can’t be pulled back in.
And it’s not just writing. As a speaker—whether public or private—my words can soothe or scorch, buoy or bruise, strengthen or sting. I’m not always successful at using them to build others up, but I try. I always try.
Stand
When Andy and I explored Southeast Asia recently, the temperature was generally hot. I’d heard it would be hot, of course, but the midday heat there, combined with the intense humidity, was more than I could have really imagined before experiencing it for myself.
Previously, I was the one who never got too warm. If there wasn’t enough shade to go around at the patio table, for example, I was the one who volunteered to sit in the sun. Remember the beaches in the 1980s? We didn’t use beach umbrellas; we just laid our colorful towels out on the sand and waited for the D.J. on the radio to announce it was Suntan Turnover Time2. I have always loved the feeling of warm sun on my skin.
Until I went on this trip.
In Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam—at least in the southern lowlands regions, all that changed. I found myself extremely conscious of where I was standing. If the sun was angling down toward one side of the street, I crossed to the other side. If a lone tree, or the corner of a building, or a parked delivery truck—or even another person—was casting a shadow nearby, I stepped into it. Standing in the sun became something to avoid. Shade became my bestie. I wrote a post from the island of Borneo, in fact, about how much my body protested the hot sun. It became on ongoing issue throughout the entire trip.
As soon as we returned to Montana, leaving the prickly heat for the fickly not-yet-spring of a high-altitude valley in the Rocky Mountains, I switched my allegiances completely. I dropped Team Shade like a hot potato and signed on with Team Sunshine. Nowadays, if I can see a shadow, then there is sunshine, and I will find it.
In either climate, I am now very conscious of where I stand. But it’s not just about sunshine for me.
The United States has become an increasingly divided place over the past decade. Perhaps you’ve noticed.
Everything, it seems, has a political overtone to it. If you wear this color hat or have a sticker on the rear window of your car portraying that historic American flag, if you prefer Dockers and loafers over Wranglers and work boots or even if you prefer to get your fast food chicken sandwich from this national chain vs. that national chain, you may be conveying—either intentionally or unintentionally—where you stand on the spectrum of conservative to liberal. It’s gotten a little ridiculous, to be honest.
Determining where someone stands on this issue or that has become the basis for whether or not certain people can become friends, or even treat each other with basic human dignity and kindness. I can hardly keep up with all the virtue signaling and side-eye and quiet judging and compartmentalizing that is happening these days. It’s not attractive.
So where do I stand? Honestly, I have to be careful to watch that my feet are planted not on Team Conservative or Team Liberal, but solidly on Team Jesus. Unfortunately, the more I try to do that, the more I lose respect in the eyes of most, it seems. Like I mentioned in my recent post about dumpster diving, I have found that I’m consistently too liberal for my conservative friends, and too conservative for my liberal friends.
Fortunately, I’m no longer a teenager trying to become popular. That’s good, because truly following in the footsteps of Jesus is generally a surefire way to become unpopular. Although rejection stings at times, Andy and I are content to be unpopular together in this one, standing where it seems Jesus stood, and following what it seems He taught. We’re far from perfect, but we are at least a work in progress.
Kneel
As you likely know by now, Andy and I are working our tails off trying to finish Walter, our Big Yellow Truck.
Hmmm . . . this reminds me of Emily Elizabeth and Clifford, her Big Red Dog:
As soon as we can finish Walter’s build project, we can hit the road for the next stage of our adventure as nomadic travelers.3 So, now that we’re back from wandering around Southeast Asia, we are hard at work on the build again. As you may recall from posts like this one I wrote back in September, I’m much more comfortable with books and words than with grubby clothes, socket wrenches, and construction dust. But the work must get done, so I’m doing my best to be a willing helper.
Often, this means I’m on my knees—not in prayer (though I ought to be doing that more, too)—but reaching for something under the truck, or perched next to a mess of wires, or vacuuming metal shavings out of the low-ceilinged bedroom area. Sometimes, if I’m going to be down there for a while, I don heavy plastic construction knee pads. Most of the time, though, it’s just my poor patellas and the poky parts and pieces of the project.
A small steel screw on the cement floor or even the head of a plastic zip tie can be torture on my knees if I’m not looking. And the ribbed plastic surface of the recycled Tesla batteries is nearly impossible for me, if I have to kneel for more than a minute. All day long when we are working on Walter, I have to watch where I kneel.
When I was teaching at an international school in Papua New Guinea, we had to learn Tok Pisin, the widely spoken pidgin, so we could communicate with the locals as needed. The word for knee is skru bilong lek. In English, we would say the screw belonging to the leg. It is the joint that makes the mechanics of the leg work. To kneel then, in Tok Pisin, is brukim skru, or break the screw.
Brukim skru, however, is not about accidentally kneeling on a screw and breaking your kneecap. No, to break the leg screw is a reference to kneeling in worship.
Brukim skru is intentionally breaking the knee, willingly choosing to relinquish your right to stand tall and proud so you can bow low in reverence instead.
That’s the kneeling that concerns me most these days.
In the culture that surrounds me (and maybe you, too), confusion seems to reign regarding what or who Christians worship. It seems some worship the flag. Others appear to worship military might or their personal collection of firearms. Still others seem to worship their favorite sports teams. I won’t even mention the fellow-humans that some Christians seem to worship. Perhaps you would disagree with me. I don’t worship those things, you may say with a huff.
Good. I certainly hope you don’t.
But I’ll be honest; it certainly does look that way sometimes. When we have nothing but positive things to say about a person or thing and go out of our way to gush their praises to anyone who will listen; when we adorn ourselves and our homes and our vehicles with emblems of loyalty to honor them; when we rearrange our lives to show our devotion, commit large amounts of our finances to them, and seek out the fellowship of others who feel the same about them as we do; when we exalt them to such a high place in our lives that any slight or perceived slight feels disrespectful to the place of sacrilege—it looks a lot like worship.
Again, my goal is to emulate Jesus. When speaking to His closest followers, Jesus encouraged them to deny their hard-earned rights, give up on getting their own way, and follow Him into a life (and eventual death) of being low in status, misunderstood, and mistreated.4 Yikes. That sounds a lot like brukim skru—willingly dropping to your knees instead of standing to fight for your rights.
We must be careful where we kneel, friend.
Fitness
But I still love a good sports story about heroic grit and determination. I do. Does that make me hypocritical after all I’ve just written here? I hope not. I will continue to work on my middle-aged fitness goals—both physical and spiritual:
Balance
Flexibility
Endurance
Strength
In addition, I will continue to seek wisdom regarding who I touch, where I stand, and before what and whom I brukim skru. I must study and even surround myself with people I would want to emulate—like Kendra Wecker of Pass, Punt, and Kick or Jasmin Paris of the Barkley Marathons—but on a much deeper level.
What about you, friend? Do you and I have similar fitness goals? Who’s out there setting an example you try to follow? Who’s inspiring you? How do you think your life touches others? What are the places where you seek to stand? Where do you find yourself kneeling, and is it the same as the place you want to expend your worship? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Until next week,
Sherry
P.S. Don’t forget the footnotes.
Incidentally, I did eventually get noticed by a college softball scout who wanted to talk to me about a scholarship, but not until I was playing in an intramurals game . . . in April of my senior year in college. Oops. It was flattering, but a little late.
Yes, this was really a thing. The Southern California radio station, KOST 103.5, would make this announcement every half hour during midday of the summer months. “It’s 1:30, Coast 103’s Suntan Turnover Time!”
I am so excited to tell you all about the big changes coming to this humble little Substack when we hit the road. The major shift will likely launch in June to coincide with our anticipated leave date, which happens to be the same time frame as Beauty and Truth Weekly’s one-year anniversary. Here’s a hint: you will get a chance to participate in our travels in a very cool way—but I won’t make you do it. I think everyone is going to like this, to be honest. I’m just not quite ready to break the news yet—much to do yet to prepare for what’s to come.
Matthew 16:24-26 (New Living Translation) “Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross, and follow me. If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it. And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul?”