Jonny Heart: Tennis anyone?

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Tennis anyone?

You know, there are few sports out there that I truly enjoy playing. They consist of Ultimate Frisbee, Football, Frisbee Gulf, and finally Tennis. Tennis is a pretty fun sport to play. I’m not that great but better then most of my friends so I think that lets me enjoy it more. In the last couple of weeks my friends and I have spent many evenings at the high school hitting a ball back and forth or playing a couple of sets, its something to look forward too during the day.

The other day while playing I kept hitting the ball into the net. Either serving or returning I continued to hit the ball into the net. Every time I failed to return the ball my temper grew and I was beginning to lose my nerve. I lost focus and got worse and worse till I was furious. My friends were profiting off my screw-ups and so their spirits were up.

I have found myself in the same situation in life. One bad thing that happened to me launched a continuous drive down a path of anger and disappointment. I tried to rise above and out of that state of mind yet the hole was to deep. It brought me down spiritually and I dragged through the days for weeks. After a while I knew that I couldn’t let it bother me anymore because I couldn’t focus on school or just be happy. I had to let it go. This wasn’t an instant transformation but I quickly returned to the good old Jonny Heart that I was before.

During the last game of that night it was my serve. I knew I had to calm down or the night would end badly and carry over when I got home. I took a deep breath and served. My best serve of the night started my best game of the night. My friend and I shut out the other team. I had to calm myself down in order to play my best. Life is much easier when you can calm yourself down and take one struggle at a time. The next day I was hanging out with my friends and asked, “tennis anyone?”

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Quotes from my Senior Patron

-Clive Staples Lewis-

"The Love of knowledge is a kind of madness."

The Problem of Pain

"We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which he will not be satisfied until it has a certain character."

Mere Christianity - (Pg. 31)

"This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies."

The Problem of Pain - C.S. Lewis (Pg. 31)

"What would really satisfy us would be a God who said anything we happened to like doing, what does it matter so long as they are contented? We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven - a senile benevolence who, as they say, liked to see young people enjoying themselves, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, a good time was had by all."

"If we wish to be rational, not now and then, but constantly, we must pray for the fit of faith, for the power to go on believing not in the teeth of reason but in the teeth of lust and terror and jealousy and boredom and indifference that which reason, authority, or experience, or all three, have once delivered to us for truth."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 139-140)

"It is not reason that takes away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other... Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your ganging moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know by experience..."

A Grief Observed - (P.g. 9-10)

"I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 7)

"It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 32)

"In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth-only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 56-57)

"Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something mush harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person-and he would not need it."