Kick-Pen

Okay, I used this forum to post awhile back about the virtues of "Kick-the-Can". I want to go to the well one more time - hopefully someone can share some insight with me.

Beginning in the forth grade, I moved around a great deal for a period of 5 to 6 years. The changing of various schools and moving 6 times during that period had an effect on me ... some good, some bad.

But the forth grade move was probably the most ominous one. I had lived in Cedartown, Georgia since I was three - that was my whole life to me. I still remember the night my Dad came home and asked what we thought about "moving west"... I think my initial impression had something to do with cowboys and Texas or maybe even California.

The destination Dad had in mind was not that far west. It was Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

My sister and I burst into tears. She had every right to be distraught since she was seriously in love with the boy down the street.

I remember the last thing I said to Dad that night was something to the effect of "Daddy, please don't make us move!"

We moved anyway.

I think I adjusted more quickly than anyone else (my brother, eleven years my senior, was already married and on his own). I began to tuck away all the negatives and find and focus on all the positive things about this move. There is probably some long and humiliating psychological term for this - but I'd rather not know about it since I think that this was the right thing for me to do.

I remember my first day in my new school - Skyline Elementary - we had to purchase our own spelling workbooks and because I started in February, mine was not the same as everyone else's. The principal explained also, that it was expected that everyone would eat the lunch provided by the school ... I had brought my own lunch for practically all my life. This was not starting well but I would focus on the positives ... there was a climbing tree in my backyard and we had an intercom in our house...

I remember hoping to establish some common ground with someone, so I talked with some of the guys about games they played. Back home we had sometimes played a game called "pitch up and smear" - it has all the benefits of football without having to fool with all the tediousness of running plays and making first downs and such. Basically, someone threw the ball into the air and it was open season on who ever caught it. To avoid being smeared one simply had to get rid of the ball. These Alabama boys were a little more advanced than me in the ways of the world - they called this game "Smear the Queer" - I knew that the word queer meant "strange or weird" so I just figured this meant that it was strange for someone to want to catch the ball.

As recess approached I started hearing about another popular game they played called "Kick-pen" it was all the rage. I had never heard of this game before.

It was "kick-pen" this and "kick-pen" that; everybody was talking about "Kick-Pen"! How did I miss out on this exciting - apparently international - sport?! It wasn't like I lived on the other side of the world or something.

How could a culture only three hours from the home I knew and loved, be so foreign?

Recess came and it turns out "Kick-pen" was just what we called in Georgia - "Kick-ball".

With the only exception being that we didn't play "kick-ball" at school so much as at home in my back yard. And there we had always only played with one base instead of three because of very small teams.

Within a few months we moved again - same area - we just moved to a house in the county and the county school was much more like what I was accustomed to ... only I did become acquainted with a lot more unsavoury words that had not previously graced my lexicon.

They played kick-pen in the county school too - played it practically every day.

By the time we moved away from there at the close of my fifth grade year, I had grown to be able to hold my own in the kick-pen arena.

We moved to Morristown, Tennessee, where they had never heard of "kick-pen".

It is easy for us to become so accustomed to what we are accustomed to - that we begin to think things are the same everywhere. I am beginning to examine this idea as it relates to ministry and the gospel - and me.

I think I have really believed that God's plan is that the whole world would look like church in America and it just ain't so.

Church in America could be very, very different from God's idea of what church should look like.

The same may be true across cultural lines here within this nation.

I could be going around talking about kick-pen and just fully expecting that everybody knows what kick-pen is - "right?" - When in actuality, people just a few hours down the road may not know anything about kick-pen nor does kick-pen matter to them.

How much of "church" or what I think of as essential to one's walk with God - is truly essential? And how much of it is just the culture that I am accustomed to?

When God calls me to affect the culture around me... does He not also have a plan for that culture to have some affect on me as well?

And what if God wants me to step out of the comfort of all with which I am familiar . . . will I cry and plead as I did with my earthly father - "please don't make me go!"

I hope not. My hope is that God is working in me to change me, so that I will want to do the thing He calls me to.