As Believers, sometimes
we give up too easily. We strive until
the effort becomes too draining. Then we
surrender, settling for mediocrity in our faith. We could learn a lot from my boyhood buddy, Royce. Royce was at least three years older than me
and sat across the aisle in the sixth grade.
That was because he had failed fourth grade, then fifth grade, and
finally sixth grade. He sported a thin
mustache and was shaving at least twice a week.
He looked like an NFL linebacker, and had the voice of a bass fiddle.
Royce and I, among a
few other kids, went to school in a little town burrowed in the Ozark
Mountains. In January of ’68, a blizzard
hammered our village, which is a rare occurrence in Arkansas. Anytime it snows, panicked Arkansans dash to
the stores, braving the eighth of an inch snowfall. They nervously stand in the long check-out
lines with their bread, milk and cheese dip as the snow deepens to a
jaw-dropping quarter of an inch. Will
they make it safely home? Prayers go up,
asking our Lord to safely guide us to the warm confines of our homes until the
half inch of snow melts away.
But not the kids. Snow meant no school. It meant playing in the
snow as much as possible until it magically disappeared sometime over the next
twenty-four hours.
When the ‘68 blizzard struck
our hamlet, every child older than four years old searched for a flat surface
to turn into a sled, whether it was a scoop shovel, dismantled ironing boards,
or Mom’s favorite serving tray. No one owned
an actual sled. That would be as
pointless as drinking unsweetened tea. Every
kid scrounged the town looking for some object he could improvise as a sled to lug
up Turkey Hollow Hill on the east side of town.
It was during the
blizzard of ‘68, Royce, Jerry, Walter and I became sledding legends in our little
town. In our search for the perfect
sled, we discovered a 1948 Ford pickup hood, which Perky Smoltz was using as a
roof over his pen of guineas.
We figured we could nab
Perky’s hood, make a few runs down Turkey Hollow Hill, and have the hood back
in place before either Perky or his guineas would even notice.
Just the stares on the other
kids’ faces as the four of us trudged up the hill with that 1948 Ford hood made
it worth it. We were literally the kings
of the hill.
None
of us knew, of course, about the relationship between weight hurtling downhill
on a snow-packed slope and the corresponding speed. More weight equals more speed when the track
is slicker than the back of a greased pig.
Mainly because of Royce,
the four of us together easily weighed over 400 pounds, so you can imagine the
speed possibilities.
We packed ourselves
into that hood, tilted the hood downward, and took off like a NASA rocket. Halfway down the hill, Jerry bailed out the
back. It didn’t slow our run at
all. In fact, we picked up more
speed. We even became airborne a time or
two. As we swept to the bottom of the
hill, kids scrambled for their lives out of the path of our sledding missile.
All the inferior sleds
were coming to an easy stop once they hit the elementary school
playground. Not us. We zipped across the playground then across
Highway 74. That ’48 hood never slowed
as it approached the floor-to-ceiling windows of the junior high library. We were coming in hot.
We cannoned into one of
the windows and glass splintered, flying everywhere. The hood finally slid to a stop against a
shelf of dictionaries.
“Wow,” Walter
whispered. I was speechless.
Royce stood up, wiping
a few glass splinters from his shoulders.
He then surveyed the room.
Finally, he spoke. “So this is
what junior high looks like.”
About that moment, one
of Perky Smoltz’s guineas strolled in, taking in all the damage. It apparently had never seen a junior high
library either.
We Believers can learn
a lot from Royce. Sometimes we’re
tempted to give up our walk, especially when we feel like we’re failing in our
faith. Better for us to understand we’ll
never walk perfectly as Jesus did.
However, we stay the course, walking faithfully because we trust in what
Jesus did for us rather than anything we could have done for ourselves. We fail, we fall, we stutter, yet we remain
committed to the struggle to be more like Him today than we were yesterday. Listen to these encouraging words from Hebrews
12:1-2: “…let us run with endurance the
race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of
faith…” May we all live out our faith as Royce did,
never quitting. Let us walk the path of
‘the easy yoke’ of full faithfulness.
*Author’s
note: The names and some particulars have been changed to protect the