Bizarre Lessons from Putt-Putt: No Room for Posers...

I took my kids miniature golfing the other day. It was hillarious. After about 4 holes, i gave up keeping score. They did really well, actually, but at 8 and 4 years old respectively, my son and daughter had much more fun improvising new uses for their putters than just "hitting the ball". The favorite use was "Posing". Example: my son would stand on top of one of the little obstacles on a miniature green and adopt a statuesque pose with his putter, usually contorting his body into some way cool, but totally impractical looking warrior stance. While doing so, he would encourage the rest of us to hit the ball while he acted as eye-candy (and a distraction) to all who were putting (or watching from other holes). Eventually, the game became more about "the pose" than it did about the holes. It might have been a par 2 hole, but 5 swings, 10, whatever... didn't matter so long as you could pose in a cool stance afterward while the rest of us played through. If i would have kept score, i'm sure it would have been something like a dectuple Bogie for each hole average or something. Ah well.

Now, you'd have to know my son. He's really into cool poses. I think it results from watching so much Anime and myriad Kung-Fu movies. We have endless discussions about how "movies are almost never about real combat". In real combat, you don't 'pose' before you strike. You just strike. In real martial scanrios, you don't monologue about your advantage, your reason for being there, etc... you just strike. In real scenarios where you are reduced to defending yourself, you're probably going to get hurt, bloody, sweaty and dirty even IF you actually manage to win or survive yourself, so if you maintain delusions about escaping unscathed and ending in a cool pose, you've been watching too many movies.

I think he's starting to get the picture. Particularly when we spar in the back yard. Poses don't do much for him. They don't even look cool if you end up on your belly with your legs tied around your neck like a pretzel. So if you spend the bulk of your time "posing" rather than carefully evaluating the situation and then executing the action necessary for victory, you're not really impressing anyone in the long run. And if you don't expect to have to get in close enough to actually take hold of your opponent and mingle your sweat, feel their breath on your neck, potentially take a cut across your own cheek and put yourself at some risk in the process, you're not really going to get in close enough to do anything of significance. And if all you do is "pose", you're never going to see your opponent stop their advance or slow their attack.

As we attempt to engage the entropy in the world around us, we are facing some very real and very lethal opponents. They have names like Poverty, Injustice, Racism, Ignorance, Spiritual Lostness, Cowardice, Lack of Leadership, Corruption and Abuse. They are the biggest, baddest bullies on the proverbial playground, and as we seek to figure out how to engage them, many of us are trying to figure out the difference between "posing" and "real combat". When we first started looking at doing community development based initiatives here at GCC, both here locally (in the Monroe Circle Community of South Bend) and in Tamilnadu (Southern India), my friend Dan Blacketor said, "well... if we're going to do this stuff, we'd better committ to it 100%. I mean, if we're going to fight giants, we'd better be prepared to get bloody in doing so if we have to. Otherwise, we'll just tick them off. And a ticked off mean giant is worse than just a mean one." So we're trying to figure out what that looks like. Here locally, downtown, we're working with literacy initiatives, vocational training, after-school care, kids programs, Bible study and small groups and feeding programs. Internationally, we're experimenting with HIV/AIDS initiatives, Conversational English, clean water, Justice and bonded-slave issues, micro-enterprise and micro-finance, construction and even technical training for low-skill secondary vocational opportunities. At this point, i'm not sure how successful we'll be in "felling the giants" that exist in our relative environments, but we're committed to getting as close as we have to in order to try... and we're committed to no longer just "posing".