THE SCENE: Beautiful, a tad warm, plentiful sunshine, low 80s, no breeze
F3 WELCOME & DISCLAIMER
Check, with special focus on our FNG, Chris, who is a mentee of Tank’s.
WARM-O-RAMA:
- Motivators (Q butchered these, so we moved on after 6)
- 7 BAC Forward, Backward (4 ct, IC)
- 7 Windmills (4 ct, IC)
- 7 Rockettes (4 ct, IC)
- 7 Tempo Merkins
- 7 Cherry Pickers (4 ct, IC)
We established (not easily, mind you…) that 7 squared = 49. Apropos, as this was a 49th Bday Q, no?
THA-THANG:
MOSEY down to gavel circle across from Area 51 :
- Birthday Sea Biscuit!
- ROUND 1: Run a lap, 49 Merkins
- ROUND 2: Run TWO laps, 49 BBS
- ROUND 3: Run THREE laps, 49 SSH
- ROUND 4: Run TWO laps, 49 Squats
- ROUND 5: Run ONE lap, 49 Seal Claps
Mosey to Big Tree near Pickett’s charge. Here there be Dragons!!
- Welsh Dragon (7 count ascending). Tclaps to F6 who did it without stopping to rest! (Q rested a bunch of times…)
MOSEY to Bottom of Pickett’s Charge. 49s! Do 4 reps of the exercise at the bottom of each of the three hill tiers, and 9 at the top. The exercises are:
- 4 Jump Squats, Run up first level, 9 more Jump Squats
- 4 Lunges (2-ct), Run up second level, 9 more Lunges
- 4 Burpees, Run up to wall at Coliseum, 9 more Burpees.
MOSEY to AO
MARY:
No time
COUNT-OFF & NAME-O-RAMA
15 strong. Welcome FNG Iron Mike, real name Chris, an 11-year old mentee of Tank’s. He wants to play middle linebacker in football, so we named him Iron Mike, with his approval. Iron Mike and After Party not tagged.
CIRCLE OF TRUST/BOM:
I recently read the Language of God by Francis Collins, a physician and scientist who spearheaded the Human Genome Project. He is currently the director of the National Institutes of Health. The book discusses his struggles as a scientist to accept God, given his rigorous training in the Scientific Method, and his reluctance, at least early on in his life, to be able to rationalize a spiritual Father without being able to identify any actual evidence that He exists. I’ll touch on some of the revelations and evidence that he lays out that builds his case for the existence of God in another Word, but I wanted to highlight one portion of the book today, because it seems timely. Dr. Collins volunteered to go on a mission trip to a hospital in a small, impoverished village in Nigeria one summer, and in the book he admits that at the time he had some illusions of being sort of a Savior figure for the people there. Here he was, a highly educated physician from America, coming to save the day for these poor villagers. But those illusions were quickly dashed. He became frustrated that most of the illnesses he was called to treat were highly preventable with just some simple sanitary and medical standards. The shortcomings of the facility where he worked were appalling… there weren’t enough hospital beds, X-ray and other basic hospital resources were lacking, etc. Frustrated, disillusioned, and overwhelmed, Dr. Collins was losing faith that his efforts could ever make a difference. And then a young farmer came in with an illness that at first appeared to be tuberculosis, but further testing revealed that he had fluid build-up in the pericardial sac around his heart. The only cure was to draw out that fluid with a syringe. In a modern hospital, this would be easily done by a computer guiding the needle. But here in this hospital, Dr. Collins was forced to do it manually. The man would die otherwise. But it was terribly risky. Dr. Collins put the syringe into the man’s sternum, and was able to draw off the liquid without piercing the heart. The farmer recovered, however, his long-term prognosis was still poor. A few days later, he came across the farmer again, who said, “I get the sense you are wondering why you came here.” Dr. Collins was shocked that the farmer had seen so clearly how he was feeling. “You came here for one reason,” the farmer continued. “You came here for me.” This was an epiphany for Dr. Collins. He wasn’t there to be the great white doctor, saving an entire village. He was there for that man. As he puts it in his book, “We are each called to reach out to others. On rare occasions, that can happen on a grandiose scale. But most of the time, it happens with simple acts of kindness of one person to another. Those are the events that really matter.”
As Steam said recently in a Word, You are exactly where you are supposed to be.
As another brother who is acting as friend and counselor to some people close to him recently said to me, “I’m exactly where I need to be”.
Maybe those simple acts of kindness will be so much more meaningful to others than you think. Maybe your belonging to F3 is part of it. Maybe that meal you deliver to Waxjob’s family will mean more to them than you can imagine. Maybe the blood you donate on Friday will save someone’s life. Maybe the Word you deliver at your Q will inspire someone to reach out to someone in need. Look for those opportunities, and then grasp them, even if they seem trivial.
MOLESKIN:
Prayers for F6 and his cousin, who is expected to deliver on Wednesday (update that the delivery was successful, and Baby Jasmine and mother are doing well). Prayers for Jetlag and his family.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Blood Drive Friday at Asylum, Hardship hill this Saturday!!