Space

This year I've taken on the difficult task of coaching a bunch of freshman and sophomore boys to play the game of soccer.  The challenge wont be getting a rag-tag group of squirrely teenagers to try to kick a ball correctly, the challenge I have found is in making sure my own knowledge exceeds theirs so I can further these young men's abilities and cohesively guide them into a functioning team.  Soccer is a beautiful game, and like most things beautiful there is a simplicity among its complexities.  As I've been reading and preparing for the season I've been impressed that the game simplified is one dependent on space.  Without space there is no attack, no motion, no connection.  But when space is found, and the ball and players move through it, there is flow, and combinations, and ultimately the team functions, and the game is played, as it should be.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about coaching the concept of space but I also have been thinking about space in my life because as I've grown older, I've found that there is a deep need in me for space.  I'm fortunate enough to live by the Pacific and on the right day with an uncrowded swell and a log of a longboard under me I get lost staring at the endless gray blue waiting for the next set of waves.  Its hypnotizing to sit there ignoring the rest of the world and take in the expansive water. Its no wonder people gravitate toward the edges of our continents so they can perch, just like I do, beside a space bigger than they can take in at once.

Recently I tied up my hiking boots, borrowed a backpack and hiked into the national forest behind my town with a few friends.  Our first miles of the journey were lit by headlamps under a moonless sky.  That night as I woke up from the hard ground I stared at the star speckled ceiling above me, and as the sun came up revealing the world I had wandered into I saw how alone and open of a place we were in.  Sun scorched grass, almost white from the dry heat, spread across the long open meadows while cottonwoods drew their last drinks from the trickle left in the streams.  As we walked further and further in, we mounted ridges and descended into valleys over and over without anyone or anything in sight.

This space is refreshing, a bit unsettling, but lends me a quick shot of perspective.  When I sit staring at the unchanging Pacific horizon or am lost among the dry fields and parched stream beds of an autumn California wilderness, I find, quite quickly, that I'm not as big as I feel sitting in front of my email, and rolling around in my office desk chair at work. Or as significant as I feel trying to balance my schedule or find time with friends.  Simply put, its humbling.  I realize that I'm not as important as I think I am. At the same time it stirs in me gratitude for that very realization and lets me relax and enjoy the space I have been allowed to discover.

I believe we're built that way.  Like a soccer team, when we find space, in whatever form that fits us, the rhythm and flow of out lives becomes more as it should be.  We remember who we really are and we encounter a bit more of the one who is much bigger than any backcountry wilderness or ocean.  This space reflects God who put it in place.  In the same way I am drawn to something bigger than me in nature I think we are made to be drawn to something bigger than us in him.  We will never understand God but we are made to know him and to realize we are much smaller and he is much bigger, loving and powerful than anything we hold up as overwhelming in our lives.  In that fact we can relax, enjoy and wonder about someone who, though a bit unsettling to our perspective, reminds us there is someone holding all of this life together.  And as we explore that space he shows us a bit more of himself in the process.