If he stumbles, he's not down for long; God has a grip on his hand. Psalm 37:24 (THE MESSAGE)
Playing Hockey on our reservation was a memorable experience! As a teenager, I got some really good lessons from that life frame. Lessons like "Don't get the ref mad or you'll pay for it!" and "There's no 'I' in 'TEAM'" and "Play hard or you'll ride the pine," and the most memorable one: "Get up, it's a long ways from your heart!"
That was Chief Allan's line! He was there at almost every game, cheering hard, chewing out the referee, yelling at us in Cree, and making sure we heard about it every time we did something right or wrong!
When a player would get hit hard, go down and want to stay there, we'd hear Chief Allan holler out, "Get up! It's a long ways from your heart!"
Unless the player really couldn't get up, that yell would have the desired effect of the wounded young warrior scraping his broken bones, bruised ego, and miscellaneous body parts off the ice and struggling back to an upright position. "Tear-dimmed eyes" were definitely not a viable option!
Sometimes in life, we get knocked down, and the natural response is to stay there. Maybe we blame God, push our "self pity," "self-sabotage," or "self-resignation" buttons, get into that "victim" mode and decide we're just going to stay down. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong, and there we are, flat on our backs!
We can give up, stay down, and get comfortable in the carnage-or catch our breath, collect our tortured faculties, and "bleed" our way back to the battle (or the bench!). We make those choices!
But we can't stay down-we need to get up! Life is still ahead! People are counting on us; the team's counting on us. God's counting on us!
We have more reasons to get up than to stay down! We can't get comfortable in victimhood!! I can still hear Chief Allan's words: "Get up, it's a long ways from your heart!"
God has better things ahead-DON'T STAY DOWN!
