The Season: Part Nine

It's a common expression to say that "God works in mysterious ways." I've seen it be true however, in many different areas of life. One of my best friends was looking for a job last Christmas season, trying to decide if he would follow his dreams of graphic design or just go serve coffees and lattes at Starbucks. After a month with no leads, he went to seek the advice of a friend in the graphic design business. As things turned out, the advice turned into a job offer with one of the top firms in Elkhart county. Thing was, that job wasn't available two weeks earlier. If he had gone in for the advice two weeks earlier, when he was starting to feel desperate, he wouldn't have had the same opportunity. The waiting had seemed like a curse, turned out that it was a blessing.

For the BC tennis team, we left the NorthWood match in a celebratory mood, but had a big tournament coming up the very next day. In the tournament were teams that I was very interested in matching up against with. Indianapolis Park Tudor was at the tourney, ranked #6 in the state at the time. Fort Wayne Canterbury was at the tourney, ranked #17 in the state at the time. Perennial area power Warsaw hosted the tournament, and there were several other strong players and teams coming. I'm still very interested in how we would have done against those teams. That is to say that we never got to play any of them.

We played NorthWood on a Friday night, Saturday morning I woke up to rain. All the night and all the morning it rained, rained, rained. I had my cell phone on in case the Warsaw coach called and wanted my opinion. I had determined that my opinion would be that we should try to play no matter what. I got up and showered, put on my silly hat and got ready to drive to the school. Then the Warsaw coach called. Unfortunately he didn't ask my advice, just told me that it was cancelled.

It was depressing. I had really been hoping to use this measuring stick, hoping that we would be able to prove our team's ability to the whole region by performing well in this fairly prestigious tournament. My wife tried to cheer me up by saying that I would have a whole weekend with my family, and I just couldn't think of it that way. Well, okay, by the end of the weekend with my little son I was happy to have spent that time with him, but originally I didn't see this as a family opportunity at all. I just saw the rain as curses falling from the sky, drop by drop.

When I went to school on Monday I stepped into our Athletic Directors office to begin the process of trying to fill our schedule again now that this tournament had fallen by the wayside. I told him that I'd keep my eye open for any tourneys looking for new teams, and that if I couldn't find any that we could maybe schedule a couple dual matches instead. That's where the curses turned into God's odd blessings.

I found on the Coaches Association website that Penn was looking for some home matches at the end of September to open their new courts. So I went back to tell Bryan that I would like to play them. When I walked into his office, he told me that the Concord coach had contacted him about a new tournament, involving Westview, Lakeland, Bethany and Concord. I was excited about that tournament, but I still wanted to play Penn. I told Bryan, and he looked at me with a puzzled look on his face, and repeated, "You want to play Penn?" I had been following Penn throughout the year, looking at their scores in the paper, and I made a foolish statement. Well, it wasn't completely foolish, but it was a little bit more assured than what I felt. I thought that we could beat Penn, but what I told Bryan was, "We'd beat them this year."

Spurred by the assurity of my statement, Bryan called Penn. Sure enough, they would be glad to play us. So the Warsaw tournament was replaced by the Concord tournament, and we also added Penn into an open slot in our schedule. Our loss had been replaced. The rain had become a blessing.

Funny thing is, that if you look at the season's prayer wall, Daniel prayed exactly for that. That somehow the rain would become a blessing to us. It proved to me again and again that God answers prayers in ways that we wouldn't request. But my eyes were beginning to recognize the way that situations were being turned for the good.

So now it was up to us to take advantage of our opportunities. You can read the match reports by clicking on the sidebar. But obviously if you look at it, we lost 2 matches and won 2 matches out of the 4 rescheduled games. So it maybe wasn't the best for our overall record. In fact, if we had played our previous schedule, we would have finished the regular season with only two losses, because we wouldn't have picked up the Concord tournament and lost to Concord again and Westview. But I'll tell you what, this rescheduling was certainly a success. And that's because of what I measure success by. But that's the story of the next post.