Bringing Back Memories

Yesterday our church had a special "Horizon" service. Horizon is their sports-and-outdoors ministry. They have netball and futsal teams that play against other teams and stuff like that, and also organise the outdoors stuff like hiking and skiing for those who are interested.

So yesterday they had a football day followed by the "special Horizon service" which took place of the regular evening service. I didn't go to the football thing but I did go to the service, which had an emphasis on "goals" and "athletics". They also looked at Timothy where it says stuff about goals and reaching for the prize or something.

They framed the service to relate to people who are into sports and appreciate athletics and competition. In other words, not me.

And halfway during the service, I got a flashback of my own athelitics-related traumatic memory that could very well be the source of my aversion to be a part of any formalised competetion to do with physical ability!

I was about seven or eight years old and it was one of those school athletic days where our school was competing against other schools. I had never been a sporty person, always preferring to stay indoors reading a book than be outdoors and running. But the teachers would put a lot of pressure on the students to compete, and I was one of those kids who took things that teachers said seriously. Not that I was a suck-up and wanted to impress the teachers or anything like that, but because I was a "true believer" and took to heart everything that adults told me. So when they urged the students to "support the school" and to have "school spirit" and all that rubbish, I took it to heart and considered it a duty to do that which I would normally choose not to, and to try my best.

So I participated in the relay race. And when I had the baton, I ran and ran, I ran as fast as I could which, although I knew wasn't very fast at all, it was faster than I had ever ran before. I was actually enjoying it, getting excited, thinking that I probably wasn't doing too bad! I had no idea how well I was doing compared to the competitors, I'm pretty sure I was completely oblivious to them, being completely absorbed in my own running, feeling that this was the best running I had ever done in my life. I get to the end and passed the baton on, where immediately I am confronted by one of my righteous team-members, who immediately begins lecturing me about how, as part of a team where others were relying on me, I should have at least put an effort into my running and how I should be ashamed of myself for not really even trying and how I let the team down.

I remember that from that moment, I told myself that I'd never, ever let a teacher use "school spirit" and "duty" to guilt me into participating in one of those athletic days, whether it was an external thing against other school or an internal thing against team houses. I didn't care. I had ever since been adverse to any kind of formalised competition, as well as to running. I also, perhaps unjustly since (with the exception of one other non-sports related incident where, again, she was being self-righteous and telling me off about something that she didn't understand) she never did anything to me that I could criticise in the coming years, I had a strong dislike of that girl. (Her going out with the boy I had a crush on in highschool probably didn't help, either, actually.)

On a brighter note, they talked about the story of Dick and Rick Hoyt, which always twinges my heartstrings.