Before My Eyes

My plan is falling apart. I have been planning this summit since May, and now I am watching it fall apart before my eyes. We had the guys almost completely planned out: Me, Brian, David, Ryan, Brennan, and Tres. The girls I had no idea about, but we were counting on a girl named Alex from Wisconsin to play with us.

Brennan will not be able to even go to AWANA anymore, let alone Summit. And in the space of 19 hours, I leanred that David, Ryan, and Alex are not going to be coming with us either.

What THIS means is that I have to go through and replan the entire scheme. I am not looking forward to this. I have a lot of work to do.

Games Practice 3 (My First)

Due to circumstances out of my control, I was unable to attend the first two practices. Last night was the first practice to which I have gone. I threw basketball relay for 30 minutes straight last night and my arms are now paying the price. It hurts to extend them.
I have a lot of areas that need work. Apparently, I slap the ball, my bounce passes aren't as accurate as I would like them to be, I need to get the ball out of my hands faster, and get a better jump out of the triangle.
I was not to impressed with the people there. There were some I thought were awful that surprised me by being adequate and some I assumed were good at basketball that were not quite there.
I am having a hard time with this thing. I know I am significantly better than just about everyone at AWANA when it comes to athletics and games and that sort of thing. Its not that I try to brag about it, I am sincerely trying not to do so. However, I am easily frustrated at the incompetencies of others and I often times let it show. I have two options, quit trying or start screaming. If I quit trying, it helps me to relax a little bit more, I don't feel angry at people because I am doing my part and they are messing it up, and I am able to shrug it off when somebody messes up. But when I do this I come across as a jerk who doesn't care. If I start to get angry, obvious what happens there, everyone and their moms (QUITE LITERALLY) get angry at me.

I'm not sure if I need patience because I sincerely doubt that waiting for people to stop messing up is going to help me. I guess I need peace to just deal with it without getting upset.

I have nothing to say so I am writing

I have nothing to say about AWANA last night because I was not impressed and I was not really let down. Although someone did say something that was pretty discouraging because I had them pegged for someone who actually cared about games and Summit and then they said it and it changed my view.

I tried to get this guy name Rae Toussaint to come play with us at Summit, but I found out yesterday that he lives in a dorm at St. Stephen's and can't. I was only slightly let down because I wasn't planning on him being able to come but it would have been a nice surprise.

Further news: I am still waiting to have tryouts. I wanted to start practicing as soon as possible, but that is definitely not happening :\ For now, we have to stick with informal practices. I don't like them, but at the moment, that is all we have so I have to live with it.

I wonder what it is like to be one of the people having to wonder and wait to see about making the A team vs making the B team. All I have to worry about is making people upset by not picking them over someone else, as bad as that is going to make me feel. At this point though, it is about the team and not about them or me. The best people will play, hopefully those people will be the ones that really care about Summit because if they aren't, I lose too. I don't get a second chance. This is it for me. Hourglass still running.

For the Fame of His Name...

Site Title and Signature

I am sure that everyone who reads this will be familiar with the term "Scholarship Camp" so I will not bother defining it.

My first year at camp I was 13 years old and going into my 8th grade year. My friend Michael and I were completely obsessed with ultimate frisbee and wanted to play badly. I know we were not the best out there at the time, but give us a break. We were 13 and 14 and we were playing with college freshmen. NO one would throw us the frisbee so we basically played defense the entire time. The people I looked up to were Ned AKA Superman, and Nathan. I wanted to be just like them. Ned was amazing and no one could touch him. Nathan Didlake actually let us play though. He would throw us the frisbee every chance he got. That made a big impression on me because he didn't have to do any such thing. I decided on the second to last day of camp that I was going to be like both of them when I was a senior in high school.

I am looking back at the moment and I have only done half of this. I have been picked first for ultimate frisbee in every game I have played since Junior year. No one I have met can defend me and no one can catch like me, or so I am told. I am every bit as good, if not better, than "Superman" ever was. This is only half of what I told myself I was going to be. I had said that I was going to be like Nathan and give the kids younger than me a chance. I am only remembering all this as I read it. Everett Timmons, on of our Summit leaders, gave the seniors a book called "Next Generation Leader" It is REALLLY good. But in the book, Andy Stanley says that a good leader is marked by the legacy he leaves behind and the people he helped to train to replace him. Well, I haven't been too good about that. I have been so busy for the last 5 years trying to get myself to the position that I am now in that I have completely blown off bringing anyone up with me. If Nathan had been like me, I would have become discouraged and, in all likely hood, would not have fallen in love with Ultimate and would not have the goal of scoring two hundred goals in my senior year alone. Nathan left a legacy AND had people he was helping to become like him. Ned, a year younger than Nathan, got up and joked one night about being the treasurer for the Nathan Didlake fan club because of what Nathan had told him one night in cabin devotionals. Basically, Nathan did everything right.

I have only talked to Nathan ONE time since then, and the other day I accidentally found my way onto his blog and I read it and he is having a tough time with some things. I don't know him hardly at all so all that I know is that he is not content with where he is at. That is all I know and I am not here to talk about him, I am talking about me. Nathan deleted his facebook and his blog two days ago for this reason. Because he wanted to be alone. So I basically have no way to talk to him or find out how he is doing. But I am praying for him just the same.

On his blog, Nathan always signed it off by saying "for the fame of His Name". This is extremely true and what I want to live by for the rest of my life, especially during Summit when it will be so easy for me to take credit for everything we do. That is the end of yet another very long post.


For the fame of His Name...

Introduction

I reside in Austin Texas and, for AWANA, I go to Grace Covenant Church. My name is Marcelo Gonzalez and, somehow, I ended up being the games team captain for our team. Two years ago I would have never thought that I would be in the position I am in now. But through different circumstances, change in leadership and rising interest in Summit, I ended up having a lot of responsibilities.

I don’t know how any of your churches have run things but this is the first time Grace Covenant has done this. We are taking a 25 passenger bus. One seat is for the driver, two for our leaders, and twenty two for participants. We are going to be taking two games team, eleven people on each team. The only time we ever took two teams, we split the talent up onto the two teams so that they were “evenly” matched. Since then, we have undergone a mass change in leadership. The new leadership is concerned about two things: doing well and enhancing the students’ abilities in life. They know that we aren’t going to do well if we split up the talent so this year, we are going to have one team that is full of the people who are best at games, and then another team for those who did not make it but still want to compete.

I, the youngest senior in our club, was chosen by the two leaders going to Summit, Frank and Everett, to be the games captain for the “stacked” team. When they told me this, I was excited and forgot to ask what exactly that entailed. I was assuming it would be to make sure everyone’s feet were behind the color line and that we were cheering our team on. I asked Frank what being “captain” meant. He told me that I would be in charge of the tryouts for which people made it on the good team and which ones did not. In addition, I am in charge of picking what people who make the team end up in what event.

At this point in time, it appears that I have unbridled reign over the good games team. It is exciting, terrifying, and upsetting all at the same time. Exciting because I will have the things I have wanted since I started Summit, terrifying because I want to do well and now that so much rests on me, if we don’t a lot of it is my responsibility, and upsetting because, from the looks of things, there won’t be a whole lot of seniors on the good team. I feel sorry for them because I know they want to do well, but they way I am going to end up setting up the team, they won’t fit in that plan. This is long enough for my first post. That gives you the basics of what my year of Summit will be about and where I am coming from.

…131 days until the first test…
…191 days until Summit…
…194 days until the finale…

My hourglass is running down…