carbonated joy

I love hockey, it’s a beautiful game. Think about it, large men knock a rubber puck around a big sheet of ice with sticks, while gliding around on razor sharp blades. AMAZING!! There are fights and playoff beards and at least 37 other reasons to really like hockey. When we lived in Raleigh, I got to meet quite a few of the Hurricanes players. They are seriously the coolest, most down to earth athletes I’ve ever met.

But, to me one of the coolest concepts in the game of hockey is the assist.
According to my friends at Wikipedia, “In hockey, an assist is attributed to up to two players of the scoring team who shot, passed or deflected the puck towards the scoring teammate, or touched it in any other way which enabled the goal, meaning that they were “assisting” in the goal.”
Players get recognized for assisting.
I love that!
In many endeavors we only notice the scorers, the BIG names, the stars, we cheer for the one who makes the goal. We don’t give credit to the ones who helped make it happen. That’s sad because not everyone can make the goal. BUT, everyone can help make the goal happen.
In hockey, players get recognized for assists.
I think heaven is like hockey.
Assists count.
I’ve heard people talk about heaven being like a big high school awards assembly with all the BIG popular people getting their rewards. They get credit for all the enormous stuff they did. They get crowns and BIG, BIG houses and if you didn’t pastor a huge church or weren’t a missionary, you might get a plastic tiara.
For starters, I think the reward of heaven is heaven. Getting to actually hang out with Jesus seems like about the biggest reward imaginable, I really don’t need a crown.
Secondly, the only MVP in heaven is the aforementioned King of EVERYthing. HE is the ONLY one who scored the goal.
We all just assist.
I love that.
That means that…
It’s not only about the mega and the most successful.
It’s not only about the loudest, shiniest or newest.
It’s also about the ones who were foolishly in love with Jesus and honestly shared that love in the smallest ways.
They unselfishly lived out the story of God.
It’s about the unsung, the unnoticed.
The dear souls who might have never attracted great numbers.
They were just faithful.
They assisted.
Assists count.
Heaven is like hockey.

I’m not a deer hunter, I’ve never sat in a tree stand on a chilly early Fall morning. I’ve never killed Bambi. I don’t decorate with antlers. But I grew up around deer hunters and I love venison chili and jerky.
My Dad was a deer hunter.
My Dad and me were completely different. He liked to hunt and work in the garage.
I liked to draw and daydream. It took us a while to just accept each other, eventually we even quietly celebrated our differences. I’m sure he sometimes wanted to change me, but He didn’t try to mold me into someone that I wasn’t. I appreciate that. Some parents do great harm by trying to resculpt what God has crafted. Parents try to sometimes recreate their kids in their image. That was never part of the deal. We were created in God’s image. That looks different on each of us.
To my Dad, deer season was better than Christmas. He grew a beard every October, as the whiskers grew so did his excitement. He was upbeat, he didn’t get frustrated as easy. He laughed more. He grunted and yelled less. We always wished he would keep the magical mood altering beard all year long, but he always shaved it off at the end of the season.
Dad would get up at an ungodly hour and go out in the woods with his buddies. They would pack Cheetos, Pepsi and Vienna sausages. They wore camouflage and sprayed themselves with something that made them smell like deer pee. They hunted with bows, rifles and muzzleloaders.
The rest of the family loved deer season too, for totally different reasons. When Dad was hunting, we got to do things we NEVER did when he was home, we ate Patio Mexican TV dinners. (After working all day, Mom never seemed to mind that she didn’t have to cook). We got to watch what WE wanted on TV. We sat in Dad’s chair. It was like a month long staycation!! Mom’s birthday and anniversary are during deer season, she sacrificed those days so that her husband could go hunting. In return, she got to wash his dirty camouflage pants and decorate her house with mounted antlers. Mom is a Saint!
Eventually, the hunters would come home late at night, usually with a big buck or two. I remember the excitement in our garage as they butchered their prey. I remember the steam that came off the carcass as the hide was pulled off. I remember the smell of blood, cigarettes and men who had been in the woods too long. I remember the happiness that came with seeing my Dad happy. I remember the year that Mom got a bigger deer than Dad with her Dodge Dart.
This time of year, I crave deer jerky, Patio Mexican dinners and camouflage sweatshirts.
I’ve never spent an hour in a tree stand, but I love deer season.

Sometimes we get what we deserve.

Surely, you have seen a child demanding something that they weren’t ready for. They want a new toy or candy. They get red faced, pound their fist and make serious noise until they get what they want. Then they realize the toy or candy doesn’t bring the blissful satisfaction they thought it would. So they demand the next thing that they think they deserve.
The sad thing is that we never seem to really outgrow that.
We demand our rights and insist that we get our way. We want instant. We want the next big thing. We are so busy winning that we never stop to listen to wiser voices. Then we find what we thought we couldn’t live without has left us empty.

I grew up in a nation that was finding it’s voice.
We demanded our rights.
We deserved it, right?
We found ourselves and forgot ourselves at the same time.
We have shut out people who were different than us. The people who looked different than us, the people who thought different than us, they all became silent to us.
Then we cry unfair when we are left out of…anything.
We constructed our little kingdoms at the expense of kindness.
We glorified the “natural born alpha leaders” even when they became bullies. They were winners. We wanted to win.
We rewarded the winners.
We hate losing so much.
We decided to value champions over character.
We decided to make everybody a winner, participation trophies for everybody!!! After all if you never lose, you never have to get honest with yourself.
We deserve to be winners, right?
And we have defined winning as having the most.
Success became about stuff and power.

But, the truly true truth is what we REALLY need is the thing we don’t deserve…mercy.
Mercy is getting what we don’t deserve.
We only find it at the end of ourselves.
It comes from laying down our rights
Mercy comes when we realize that Jesus is for losers.
He was a little backwards, he defined winning as losing, he said the first will be the last, he said you find yourself by living for others.
It turns out that He was the true Alpha (and Omega) Male.
But we miss the point, we make our demands. We don’t realize that true life is about giving glory and not getting greatness.
As long as we are more interested in being right than redeemed we are screwed.
What if we really got over ourselves and lived the way we were designed?

But, for now…
We’ve gone and done it.
We’ve demanded our rights.
We’ve elevated ourselves.
We’ve clearly established our dominance.
We’ve drawn lines between us and them.

And now…
It seems that we as a nation are getting what we deserve.
God help us all.