Tag: Golf Balls

Posted on

Pranksters

For some reason for most of my life I have been on the receiving end of pranks. Here are just a few, and believe me, this is just a sampling of some of the stunts that have been pulled on me.

In seminary, I was the student body vice president, and while setting a vision casting message in chapel, I suddenly began to hear voices, gathering my wits and trying to figure out where they were coming from, I stepped back from the podium to see a walkie talkie on the stand. In the audience was my “best friend” with the other walkie talkie, critiquing me and cracking jokes as I spoke. 

One day during our pastorate I hopped into my car to the foulest smell. It was summer and the stench was somewhere between that of limburger cheese and spoiled garbage. I search for days for the source, with no success. On one particular Sunday when I had to pick up a guest speaker the smell was so bad that I went through a car wash and asked for extra scent to mask the smell. I picked up my guest, made it to church, but when we came out after service, I realized I was in trouble. I borrowed a car, made it through the afternoon, and the next day once again began the search for the source. It was a few days later, after leaving a hospital call, that I found the problem. My brother-in-law had taken one of his daughters’ dirty diapers and stuffed it up under my seat. 

On another occasion, not to be outdone by her uncle, my daughter Risa, who’s foot odor could be used as a weapon of mass destruction, once stuffed her dirty socks inside my pillowcase. The first night I must have been too tired to care but by the second night I was once again on the prowl for the source of the stink. The smell was nauseating and the more I sniffed for the source the worse it got. When I found her socks in the pillowcase, not only did I have to wash the pillowcase, but the pillow too. The latest stunt is still an ongoing mystery. One of my favorite things about our current home is that it backs up to a golf course. After a long day, I love to walk through the woods and gather lost golf balls. Last week I was excited to get out after Memorial Day when the weekend golfers had played. As I was retrieving golf balls, I noticed that I had found several of them that looked the same, seemed odd, but I didn’t have my glasses on, so I wasn’t able to discern the logo. The next day our kids came over for the evening and were looking at my haul. I should have known that something was up because rarely are they interested in my discoveries, but as they surveyed my treasures, Gentry remarked, “hey dad, look at this one.” The golf balls that had looked curiously similar were golf balls with my face on them, and not only my face, but personalized with my name too. I still don’t know who the prankster is, I have my list of suspects, but I did surmise my kids were in on the prank. I have questions. First, who’s mind is this demented? Second, who chose the horrific picture? Third, who has time to think of this kind of prank. Fourth, who came out and shanked golf balls in the woods and when? And finally, did they hit more than the six golf balls I found?

As usual there is a life lesson in all this. Like the pranksters in my life, you will always have adversaries and situations in your life. Their goal? To get you out of rhythm, to continually attempt to distract you from your purpose, and to create chaos in your life. While you can’t stop these attacks and distractions, you do have a choice in how you respond. You can become angry. You can give up. You can become bitter. Or learn to take them head on. Laugh them off, learn from them, and move on. Perspective is important in life, and when it comes to pranks, I view them as a sign that someone loves me, the pranksters know I can take their shenanigans and they know that I will laugh it off.  I also love that I can be the object that causes someone to laugh, that I can make someone else’s day a little lighter. Plus, they’ve made for some incredible illustrations and gave me some great stories to tell.Just for kids, vote for your favorite prank pulled on me and share a favorite pulled on you!

Posted on

778 Golf Balls

Our home sets on the sixth hole tee box of a 497-yard par five. The tee shot on the hole must be nearly perfect as the tee box is guarded on both sides by large trees. If you get your ball through the narrow corridor of woods the hole opens up enough for your ball to hit in the fairway. But, if you hook it left, you’re in the woods, slice it right and you’re in the pond.

This past year 778 golfers either hooked or sliced their shot bad enough to lose their golf ball. I know because that’s how many golf balls I collected on the sixth hole last year. Who knows how many more were lost on the other 17 holes.

A few days ago, I was pilfering through my buckets of golf balls, and it struck me that over a course of a year, that if I had 778 golf balls, that meant there had been at least 778 bad shots on the sixth hole alone. It also hit me that even though I had heard several weird sounds after errant shots and more than a few curse words, as far as I know, I had never seen one person give up, quit, go to the club house, put their clubs in their car, and go home. No, though they hit a bad shot, they continued to play their round of golf. Why? Because one shot does not make a round.

While a bunch of poor shots can put you in a bad mood and cause you to have a bad round of golf, you can have a bad shot or two and still shoot a good score. Even more, you can have an off day, come back the next and shoot par.

That’s important to remember and it makes for a good life principle too. Not every day is every decision going to be right down the middle. Once in a while you are going to hook a decision or slice a choice. It might be a business decision, the wrong word at the wrong time with a spouse, or a bad moment with your children, but that decision, wrong word, or bad moment doesn’t have to define you or your life.

Too often we feel like failures because we’ve made a couple of bad decisions or poor choices, but we all have bad moments, bad days, and even bad weeks, but we must not allow those moments to define us, corrupt our spirits, or cause us to quit.

Our adversary’s objective is always to get us to think, that one choice, one bad moment, was your defining moment. Give up, give in, and quit. His goal is to cause us to become discouraged, to give up on our marriages, to say I’m a failure as a parent. I’m here to say, don’t allow a bad decision or moment define you. Keep fighting. Keep swinging. Keep playing the game. You can still win. God is for you!

How do I know? The Bible shows us. A woman had not one bad swing, but five, and was in the midst of another bad swing. She had five husbands and was getting involved with man number six. Society had discarded her, religion had likely abandoned her, but not Jesus. He shows up, adjusts her perspective, offers her grace, gives her hope, and by the end of the day, she is inviting people she had been avoiding in the morning to come and meet the man who had changed her life. This was no one day, happy, good feeling moment, this was a realigning of her vision and allowing her to see herself as Jesus did. That’s what God wants to do for you.

If 778 golfers can keep playing after a bad shot, if Simon Peter can go from a man of denial to a man of destiny, and Paul can go from a terrorist to an evangelist, then what is your excuse? Get up. Keep fighting. If you fail, make this life decision. That from this day forward I will get up one more time than I fall.