I didn't make the team

I grew up in Plano. People are rich there. My highschool had 3600 kids at in my junior year . . . for two grades. So, at this school needless to say, it was no easy task to get on a varsity team. I solved this problem by rejecting the idea of team sports when I was in sixth grade. Go me, with all my rebelliousness. Anyway, with the hundreds of kids at our school who didn't make the cut for a varsity team there was a solution: the lacrosse team! Now make no mistake, I have the utmost respect for the game of lacrosse . . . it's just that Plano is in Texas. And, Texas is hot. So, when you combine lighter weight football pads, a soccer field, and a sport where you are expected to run really fast while getting barraged by titanium poles attempting to sever your hands from the rest of you, with 90+ degree heat and large quantities of ozone filling the air, most parents don't sign their kids up. Then there's Plano, where skinny white kids don't stand much opportunity to see any Friday night lights. So they play lacrosse instead.

I on the other hand had rejected sports in general, until I sobered up (literally), and found some respect for athletic endevors my senior year. That to say: I didn't even make the lacrosse team. Sad, indeed.

Still, I carried this hope of being like the lacrosse kids off to college with me. Then I realized that my college was in Arkansas . . . they've never heard of lacrosse in Arkansas. Or, so I thought, until I realized that our school pulled in an inordinate amount of yankees. My crushed dreams sprang to life. Now, I had no real clue of how to play lacrosse. I did pick it up, but I knew in my heart I was never going to be very good. I also picked up some nasty asthma attacks after hard games, and realized if I were to really commit to traveling to be part of the team my grades were going to begin to suck. Still, I tried for a while . . . and now having not touched a lacrosse stick in three and a half years, I wonder . . . . what the heck was I thinking??

I did enjoy the game occasionally, but let's be serious here . . . I'm not competitive, nor really mean . . . and I still live in Texas, where it is still too freaking hot to play lacrosse. So, why did I spend three semesters commiting myself to this idea? Because basically it was a community. Now I must say, not all, but lots of the team were morons. They carried the same idiotic jock metality that I think turned me away from sports in middle school. Yet, for a while, I still lived with the high school clique mindset, where I wanted to part of a group that was cool.

I think God used that. Though I still look back with some regret at what amounted to a general waste of time, I do see the contrast between the lacrosse team (as well as my social club) and my closest group of friends. Between a group who's uniting factor was atheletic competition, and a group centered around God and his will for the world.

It took me a long time to perceive that. I spent so much of my early adulthood trying to distinguish between what matters and what doesn't. I think I only truly came to make that distinction because of the way God connected me to that group of people. I remember when we all first came together, thinking that I could never consider them my closest friends, and only months later realizing that the people I had assumed previously I was close to could never begin to match the intimacy I had seemingly stumbled upon in this group.

Maybe lately I've noticed how that such "stumblings" are the furthest thing from chance. That's what I've been realizing about community, it's more than just a benefit of serving God, but actually comprises the deepest core of God's will. God's desire is to connect that which was never intended to be separated. Surely between he and us, but I believe every bit as much between each other.

I've begun to understand the ideal that humanity was always intended to be. A race of people, united in spite of such wonderful diversity. If only we could first notice a contrast between the sweetness of community formed around God opposed to the petty allure of alliances built around other purposes. I've been humbled too at how fragile community can be, and how costly to maintain. Yet I also wonder how much the world would be changed if we could somehow pay such a price, and even in community drifting apart, how much could be changed if we carried such a spirit with us everywhere we go?