<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Hamilton Coe Throckmorton<\/p>\n
September 8, 2009<\/p>\n
It was the unknown coach who got it.\u00a0 A stranger to us, it was the coach who gave us our perspective back and ultimately set our faith straight.<\/p>\n
In the larger scheme of things, the events of that day certainly weren’t a tragedy.\u00a0 As athletic moments go, though, it was pretty bad.\u00a0 So many parents know the feeling: your son or daughter is competing, and something goes horribly wrong.\u00a0 Your heart sinks.\u00a0 And you’d give anything to undo it.<\/p>\n
As parents, we couldn’t have been more proud.\u00a0 In his first year of college, our son, Taylor, had qualified for the Division III indoor national track and field championships.\u00a0 My wife Mary and I drove to Indiana, along with Taylor’s brother and grandmother, to watch the race.\u00a0 He would be running in the distance medley relay (in which four runners from each team each run a different distance).\u00a0 The first eight of the ten teams competing in the event would be named All-Americans.<\/p>\n
Anxiously we waited for the race to start.\u00a0 In the jam-packed arena, as we tried not to think about it, we found ourselves standing next to a man we had never met.\u00a0 He was quiet and friendly.\u00a0 We chatted about training techniques and diet.\u00a0 We learned about his family.\u00a0 We never did get his name, but later on, as we tried to recollect the conversation, we thought he said he coached at a Mennonite college.\u00a0 At the time, it didn’t seem to matter much.\u00a0 We were focused on the race.<\/p>\n
As race time approached, the coach sweetly told my mother he would time Taylor’s split in the relay and let her know.<\/p>\n
The suspense built.\u00a0 Finally the gun fired and off they went.\u00a0 The first leg put Taylor’s team in great position.\u00a0 Taylor was to run the second leg, the shortest of the four at 400 meters.\u00a0 After he had completed the first of his two laps, he was running as well as he ever had.\u00a0 Suddenly, the runner behind him inadvertently tripped Taylor, and down he went, sprawled flat out on the track.\u00a0 By the time he got up, his team was effectively out of the race.\u00a0 They came in dead last.\u00a0 No All-America status for them.
\nWe were struck dumb.\u00a0 We were well aware that, on the scale of human disasters, this was minuscule.\u00a0 While Taylor had lost some skin and gotten pretty banged up, he would soon be fine.\u00a0 No one had gotten sick.\u00a0 No one had died.\u00a0 People deal every day with news far more dire and terrible than this: lost jobs, negative biopsies, addicted children, sudden deaths.\u00a0 Not to mention the hunger and violence and war that are the real scourges of so many lives.\u00a0 This fall of his was merely a blip on the screen of losses.\u00a0 Nevertheless, in the moment it was devastating.\u00a0 All the team’s hopes were dashed, their dreams cut short by a random accident.<\/p>\n
With his fondest athletic hopes out the window, we wondered how Taylor would handle it.\u00a0 And as his family, we found ourselves looking for a way to get our own bearings.\u00a0 We knew, at some level, that there had been more than a hint of athletic idolatry in our anticipation.\u00a0 We knew that we had made too big a deal of the event.\u00a0 And we knew that, like many Americans, we had elevated athletic success to the pantheon of our concerns.\u00a0 We knew all that.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, we also knew that, compromised as it has no doubt become, as with all fields of daily activity, that same athletic field could be the site of grace and redemption.\u00a0 So we looked for it. \u00a0\u00a0In the morgue that passed for dinner that night, with Taylor and his teammates and their families, sparks of grace began to emerge.\u00a0 Someone teased Taylor about his fall.\u00a0 His older brother, Alex, heard the tease and said to Taylor, in a low voice, “It wasn’t your fault.”\u00a0 He wasn’t going to let his brother take the blame.<\/p>\n
The next morning, Taylor reported that after his race, the last race of the day, he had noticed a big cleaning machine, something like a Zamboni, going out on the track.\u00a0 Taylor assumed that it was going to clean the whole track in preparation for the next day’s events.\u00a0 No, he said with a laugh, the machine went straight to where he had fallen, cleaned that spot, and returned to its resting place.\u00a0 Taylor noted wryly that the machine was probably cleaning up the skin he had left on the track.\u00a0 He seemed less devastated than I thought he’d be, and perhaps less devastated than the rest of his family was.\u00a0 Having put so much time and effort into running, he already was able to say, “If I didn’t have legs and couldn’t run again, I’d be fine.\u00a0 There are so many other things to do in life.”\u00a0 We weren’t sure if he really believed it, but we also knew that his aiming toward that perspective boded well.<\/p>\n
After we had returned home, something about that coach kept coming to us.\u00a0 My mother wondered if we might be able to figure out who he was.\u00a0 Remembering what I thought was his Mennonite affiliation, I did some sleuthing and finally learned, from his picture on their website, that his name was Lester Zook, and he coached at Eastern Mennonite University.<\/p>\n
Armed with an e-mail address, my mother wrote him.\u00a0 “I write to tell you that I shall never forget you and your presence at that event.\u00a0 You had promised to give me the time of Taylor’s [400 meter] split.\u00a0 After the shock of his fall you waited quietly next to me and when it was over you said very softly before you left: \u201853.’\u00a0 I shall never forget it or you.\u00a0 Actually 53 was pretty good after a fall, right?”<\/p>\n
She told him that Taylor’s skin was healing nicely, and she finished by saying, “Fortunate are the young student athletes who perform under your tutelage.\u00a0 Thank you for being so engaged with us and for your kindness.”<\/p>\n
The next day, my mother received this reply from Coach Zook: “Mrs. Throckmorton: Thanks so much for getting in touch.\u00a0 I admire your persistence; I am beginning to see where Taylor gets it from!\u00a0 It was delightful to talk with you and your family at the NCAA meet.\u00a0 I felt horrible about Taylor’s fall; I was stunned when he went down, and I could tell you were, too.\u00a0 Yet, a 53 is admirable-I told my high school senior son the story and he said, \u2018Dad, I can’t run a 53 when I stay on my feet!’\u00a0 And initially I felt doubly bad that you all were there to see it happen.\u00a0 But reflecting later, I realized that in fact, that is why you were there.\u00a0 It is family we need at such times, to remind us, more than teammates and coach ever can, that our value as human beings is deeper and our identity and worth as children of God is far broader than our performance in one race at one meet during one season.\u00a0 So I believe God had a purpose in bringing you all the way from Maine-it was to be there for your grandson at that moment, and teach him something eternal. . . . At the end of the day and at the end of this life, what do we have but our character, and what we have received by grace?”<\/p>\n
Rarely, if ever, have I heard the gospel spoken as clearly, as graciously, as eloquently as that.\u00a0 He had articulated beautifully the sweet spot of faith-that what we have, we have received at the hand of God, that our worth lies not in what we’re able to accomplish, and that faithfulness to God entails presence and love in the midst of suffering.\u00a0 When things go wrong, when hopes and dreams are dashed, when nothing goes quite as we’d like it to, the truest beauty is that God is in the middle of it, loving us despite, and even because, of it.\u00a0 To follow that star of grace, and to stand next to each other at the foot of the cross-that’s fullness of life.\u00a0 The coach reminded us.<\/p>\n
Hamilton Coe Throckmorton is Senior Pastor of Federated Church, UCC, in Chagrin Falls, Ohio.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hamilton Coe Throckmorton September 8, 2009 It was the unknown coach who got it.\u00a0 A stranger to us, it was the coach who gave us our perspective back and ultimately set our faith straight. In the larger scheme of things, the events of that day certainly weren’t a tragedy.\u00a0 As athletic moments go, though, it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":81,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fallwinter-2009"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/81"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":925,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions\/925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}