Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Yesterday, I found something out about myself. If I am not good at something, but I do one good thing in it and someone notices, I try a lot harder. And I sometimes get better. Two instances come to mind when I say this. A couple of months ago, Blake (our youth pastor) did this thing on Wednesday nights called "Hyperlinc." We played games for almost two hours once a week. I loved it. One of the nights, we played Capture the Flag. I love this game, but I have never been particularly good at it. We played three rounds and as we got to the second round, it was tied. The opposite team then decided that the teams were unfair, and insisted that we give them a player. Again I will say this--the teams were tied. So Blake had a discussion with them of who they wanted. I don't know why, it could have been a serious mental breakdown on their part, but they chose me. I wasn't terrible...but I definitely wasn't great. The team that I switched to dominated. I want it to be clear when I say this that if I sound a little cocky...let me be cocky. I was so not expecting this. I captured almost every single one of the other team's players and put them in jail. I would not have done nearly so well if they hadn't chosen me. It boosted my opinion of myself. Yesterday, we played soccer in P. E. I am not so great at soccer. And by not so great, I mean seriously. Not so great. I was playing defense, and apparently it was obvious I wasn't good, because everyone on the opposite team tried to kick it to my side, because I couldn't stop them. Brian Conner was on the other team, and he had also been playing defense. (For those of you who don't know, Brian is very athletic. Very.) He switched near the end of the game and brought the ball to my area. I came up to him, and completely on accident, I kicked the ball away from him. The next time he took it to my area, he said, in all seriousness, "Please don't kick it, Emily!" Like I could actually do that if I was trying. I very rarely make any contact with the soccer ball. After that, I was on fire. For me. I tried like crazy. I actually had an assist, and I was so excited. I wasn't much better, but I tried, and I enjoyed it. I guess what I can conclude from this is that I like praise. A whole lot.

The song today is Thief in the Night by Leeland.
"Great is Your love and Your faithfulness, it's Your faithfulness that carries me. Many times I've run away, forsook Your love and all Your grace; still You call out my name. Yeah, You still care that I be saved. So I'll sing the glories of Your name, Your awesomness I will proclaim until You come. Until You come and take Your bride away like a thief in the night, You'll take us away."

3 comments:

  1. Let me explain a little something from the viewpoint of someone with over fifteen years experience coaching high school age girls: You are exactly the type of player I would like to have in any sport. I know this from watching you play basketball for about ten minutes. Why? A couple of reasons:
    1) You play hard all the time. You play serious and want to do well. Your mistakes don't bother you enough to take you out of your game, but they do bother you enough to try to fix them.
    2) You are a team player. You don't have to be the star of every play. You make sure your job is done, whether there is any glory in it or not.
    3) You are what every coach wants in his players: You are coachable. When I gave you one short and simple piece of advice to improve your defense, you listened to every word I said, and I'm willing to bet you tried it the next time you played. As a coach, I can tell you this is as important to me as any natural ability or size advantage. That is one of the main reasons I prefer coaching girls to guys. Guys think they already know everything and a coach doesn't know what he's talking about. Girls can normally take instruction better because they don't assume they know better than the coach. If only their parents had this same self-awareness...

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  2. Bear--You are awesome. :) You have no idea how uplifting that was. Thank you. I am definitely trying a whole lot more in sports I don't necessarily like after last week.

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  3. we didn't pick you to get traded because we thought you were terrible. the other team was upset that i was going to start playing so we let them choose. you were chosen more than you were discarded.

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