Step to the Pulpit

 I've helped coach freshman football for the past four years.  My initial experience wasn't what I expected, and each following year has adopted its own identity.

When I played at Aptos, in 1981,  I played for two reasons:

1. I loved the game. 

2. My family was failing to provide me with a sense of belonging. 

Being part of the team helped heal that. Especially being part of a football team.  Here's what it did:

1. For the first time in my life I was able to create my own expectations of myself. 
2. I was allowed to decide, for myself, the necessary, minimum effort, to manifest those expectations.
3. I was allowed to find my own depth (the one I wanted to test, and prove, and expand.)
4. And by being allowed to do those things I was allowed to be myself.

During my four years I discovered the expectations I had for myself were often higher than those put upon me by others.   I discovered that the work required to reach them didn't change, but my motivation to do so, did.  Football became the arena I used to test what was real.   My belief in what I felt inside?  Or the programmed criticisms of those I unknowingly threatened?  The stadium became another classroom.  The insights gained there, during adolescence, are the only ones that remain from high school, thirty years ago.

I know that being ignored, and criticized,  fail as measurements when measuring the human spirit.

 I know you can offset the doubts others voice about you with a determined effort to find out who you are, when you're alone.     

I know that if you want to find out if you have Heart, you'll have to exceed  the

limits of your body.

I know that one of the best things you can allow yourself, and others, is forgiveness.

And I learned all that playing a game. 

Coaching provides the same opportunity for insight.  It offers a unique opportunity for repair.  I need those.  Without them I become complacent.
I don't want to accept what others say brings happiness, as my own.
I don't want to agree to a measurement of success, if it leaves me feeling like a failure.
I don't want to abandon the life I want to live for the one that grants acceptance to the crowd.
I don't want to participate in diminishing others.

I haven't been successful at any of those things.  I'm not sure I will be.  I can accept that as long as I don't trade the pursuit of them, for comfort.

Football is just a silly game.  Just like a kitchen is just a place to prepare food,  or a salon is a place to get your haircut.  Unless the people working in them, emerge.  When that happens, it becomes Art.
  

When the arena becomes the outlet, 

who you are is acknowledged.  

It introduces you to what you've denied about yourself,

 and gives it back to the world.

That's when work becomes your pulpit.  It becomes your place.