A few Mondays ago, I drove with my friend Jay to the basketball game we play every Monday night.  Our team, Barnes Building, had been undefeated, and would be playing a very tough team indeed.  We loosened up as we always do, and I started the game strong, scoring 2 three pointers and a layup in the first 3 minutes.  The problem was, the other team scored about 20 points as we were significantly over matched.  Our team was frustrated and I was among the frustrated.  During one foul called on me, I turned around and mentioned to the referee that he was “clearly wrong about calling that foul.”  He ignored me.  This was not our first altercation.

More frustration set in, and 5 minutes into the game, the ref called a foul on one of my teammates, and I was really upset.  I felt my blood boiling with an intensity probably not seen since the clash between alpha male marine and alpha male car salesman (who I’ve since found out is a trash man).  So the ball had been shot by the opposing team, the foul was called and the ball bounced to me as I headed towards my bench.  In realizing how frustrated I was, I motioned for someone to come onto the court in my stead.  Now I was walking toward the bench with the ball, and I flipped the ball to the opposite ref.

I suppose the referee who called the foul thought in some way I was being disrespectful, because instantly he called a technical foul on me, and stated that, “By rule, the ball must go to the closest ref.”  (this, I believe, is a bunch of crud)  Naturally my frustration got the best of me and I told him he was full of himself and that he must be living in a “horrible call world tonight.”

Then he says to me, “Are you finished?”  To which I replied, “I guess I am.”  At this point, Jay yells at me, “Marty, get out of here and go into the hall.  We need you.  Calm down.”  I knew my control issues were rising, so I took his advice, and walked towards the door.  Three steps away from the door, with my head straight down and my hands on my hips, I chuckle to myself, thinking that I really need to calm down.  Apparently, the provoking ref heard my chuckle, (no one else seemed to though) and called a double technical on me.  I was kicked out of the game.

Furious I left the room ( he wouldn’t talk to me after I made a few comments about his refing abilities) and walked in the hallways for about 15 minutes.  I had become “Angry Marty”.  I was angry.  Then I walked back into the gym, didn’t say a word, and watched as our team played well, but lost.

I guess this post was more about my shortcomings than anything.  I like competition (not a shortcoming), I like to win, and I hate to lose.  I also would (in the flesh, not the spirit) like to give the provoking referee a wedgie, but alas, he will one day be our provoking referee again, and I will need him to not try to provoke me out to the proverbial (or literal) hallway.  One lesson I learned through this however…

Angry Marty is never more productive than Level-headed Marty

I didn't know the kid from the "Wonder Years" played basketball!

Intensity.

That’s what happens when the commanding officer calls his or her platoon out and moves them to another level.  Or when the coach builds a plan to utilize the strengths of the team in an effort to win the game and ultimately, the championship.  Or what happens when a leader builds a plan to take his tribe through a new open door of possibilities.  Or when a pastor calls the people in the church to move out of Ur.

The platoon or the team or the group or the church begins to feel stretched and intense and insecurities come to light, and all the good and bad of the group floats to the top for all to see, and the question remains, “How do we handle the good and the bad now?”  Or perhaps a better way to put it is…

How do we handle the intensity?  Peyton Manning or Brett Favre?  Kobe Bryant or Allen Iverson?  Ulysses S. Grant or Leonidus Polk?

In my middle school years I played basketball for a small Christian school.  I remember one night in 8th grade at the York School (our home ‘arena’) we were playing another middle school rival known to us only as Stateline.  The Red Machine came into our home and I figured we would beat them, because I thought that of everyone we played.  That night the game was close (tied at half) and then they took the lead by 5 with a minute to go.  Their lead was still 5 with 14 ticks left on the clock, and with that amount of time remaining, I brought the ball down the court and launched what felt like an NBA 3 pointer into the air.

Now I move to present tense for the play by play.

Thankfully the ball swishes through the net, making one of the most beautiful sounds ever made in history, and the crowd goes wild.  Time out.  8 seconds left on the clock – they bring the ball in and we foul them.  Stateline goes to the line, and misses both shots.  We quickly bring the ball in, but in some freak of nature, we lose the ball and it’s Stateline’s ball under our basket.  We call another time out.

Intensity.

The coach gives us a quick speech about hustle and winning and getting the ball in the hole, and we head out onto the court, and I swear the point difference between the two teams is 3 points.  I’m standing at the middle of the key guarding my player in a mano y mano press, when the whistle blows and play starts.  The crowd is still cheering us on, and everything is kind of blurry, when out of nowhere the ball lands in my hands.  He throws it right to me.

I stand stunned, trying to figure out what to do with the allotted time left on the board, and I head for the 3 point line.  I wish I could end this story hailing myself as an excellent hero of this intense game, but alas, the Spirit of Brett Favre took hold of me (he started his career about 4 years later), and the referee calls me for traveling as I dribble (or not) the ball out of the key.

My return to present day and past tense.

To make matters worse, the point difference between the two teams was not 3.  It was 2.  So as I stood by myself about 4 feet away from the basket, all it would have taken was a layup.  It was an intense game, and intensity took hold of my body and spirit, but unfortunately the intensity controlled me, and not vice versa.

When a team or a platoon or a group or a church decides to move past where it has been, it gets intense.  But the intensity can’t control us…

We must control it.

Last night my basketball team lost in a single elimination playoff game.  If you know me, you know I like this as much as I like watching my sister in laws dog for 5 weeks.  We didn’t play well, and it was quite frustrating, but there was a bright side, a proverbial lesson to be learned.

One thing I’ve learned in my 10 +years of doing what I do is that you can’t win all the time and sometimes you lose, but how you lose can be just as important to your natural growth as a person than actually winning all the time.  The person who wins all the time isn’t mature, for they can’t understand what it is to feel loss, and to know loss is to grow up in ways that winning can’t provide.  So here is just one of a few  thought I had on losing well fresh off our playoff loss last night:

If you’re going to lose, lose with a great team. I can’t tell you I enjoyed losing last night, but I can tell you it will be that much easier to play again because of the group of guys I play ball with.  There are teams in our league that have killed us in the past, and they’ve bickered back and forth about everything – and the next year they were on a different team.  There were a few years at Fellowship when my predecessor made some hard decisions and things were really lean for a while people wise, which of course led to hard financial struggle.  After feeling the joys of winning before, this felt like losing.  But we were able to walk through those difficulties because we enjoyed working together through those valleys.  Last night’s playoff loss produced a bitter tasting puddle in my mouth, but thankfully I love to play with the group of guys I play with each week, so on to next season.  Interestingly enough, this is also one of the reasons I love being at Fellowship now as the lead pastor.  The last two years haven’t always been peaches, but I’ve walked with some truly wonderful compadres, and this makes all the difference in the world.

Now, if I could just find a bright side to dog sitting, we’d be all set.

At the height of my anger is a terrible time to take action.  (Read part 1 here)

I thought about this as I walked out of the gym after being mauled to the floor by an opposing player in a game of basketball.  I wondered when things were going to return to normal in regards to my heart rate, desire to punch someone out, and my general attitude.  I was really angry.  Like the kind of anger that causes your feet to stomp on the ground in an apparent effort to get to China or your hands to flail at the air as the only source of wind energy in the area.

But things would not turn to normal until I started acting normal.  People around me wouldn’t trust my judgment until I proved that I could be trusted.  At some point, we lose control with anger, and people don’t view us as as rational, no matter what we are thinking about ourselves or no matter how justified we are to be angry.

This demonstrates the importance of my walk to the hallway.  The surest way for me to be ignored when trying to get across my point was to act irrational and to do irrational things.  So I left the game, and walked out the gym to the hallway.  Eventually I became rational again.  And that’s why the referee even talked to me in the first place.

In order for things to be normal again, I had to start acting it.

Monday night I played basketball for the first time since I sprained my thumb more than a week ago.  Also, my team achieved their first win after a lot of close games.  We won big.  It was nice.

Toward the end of the game, I drove down the court and basically walked in the middle of four guys who thought I was going to pass to the outside.  I decided to take the layup and headed for the basket.  With relative ease I went into the air, until a player from the other team attempted to block my shot.  The result was he grabbed my arm and the rest of his body slammed my body immediately onto the hardwood floor.  With no defenses, my elbow and knee hit the floor.  Thankfully I was not hurt, but I was madder than a hatter in Wonderland because no foul was called on the play.  So were my teammates as they quickly came to my defense with screams at the referees, who apparently were oblivious to…well, anything at all.  My emotions were getting the best of me so immediately I asked someone to come into the game for me, and I walked out to the hallway of the school to calm down.

It was great that I had friends to stand for me at that point, but I learned a far greater lesson tonight.  There are some situations in life that have no resolution.  You can get mad.  You can yell.  You can lose your cool or cry or blame everybody.  But the result will be the same.  After the game as we had handily won by 40 points, I calmly walked to the ref who missed the call and asked, “What was up with the missed call?  Did you see me fall to the floor when the guy crashed into me.”  His response was, “I was looking at the ball, and didn’t see the foul.  I asked the other ref and he told me he didn’t think you were fouled.”  And he didn’t have to say, End of story, see you later crybaby.

And that is it.  No resolution.  No playback.  Just me getting hit, no foul being called, and life goes on.  I imagine if the stakes were higher it might me more difficult.  If someone I loved piledrove me into the floor, (figuratively speaking of course) I would probably want resolution or some sort of vengeance, but sometimes it just doesn’t come, and we’re left wanting something more, feeling like God and friends have left us in some way.  If the backstabbing hurts or the gossip cuts and there was nothing anybody could do, how do we feel?.

This happens.  And it makes me sad for all parties.

I guess I’ve finally figured it out, but it took me long enough.  I’ll describe the two scenarios.

Late last evening I found myself in a Greek pizzeria in the middle of nowhere U.S.A. (otherwise known as Rutland, MA).  I was sitting with a group of families that I have come to love being around in the last few years.  We talked about football, medicine, Spanish (yes, my wife was involved), and community.  I shared about me, and listened about them, and in the end, I had this incredible sense of fulfillment that I did not have even 2 hours before.

Earlier in the evening I played basketball with about 20% of the group in the pizzeria (our wives and children joined us for the festivities).  We played hard and we had fun, but in the end we came up short.  I was sick.  Not in the ‘my stomachs a bit too queasy and I think I have the swine’ sense, but more like the ‘I want to kick these bleachers across nowhere U.S.A’ sense.  I couldn’t believe we lost, and in the end – like most guys in the competitive world – I blamed myself.  “I could have done more,” assumed my internal thoughts battling for justification.

Then Carie and I drove to the pizzeria and enjoyed the company of most of the team.

And it was then, after only 34 years of living on this earth that it finally hit me.  I mean, I knew this intellectually, but not actually.  We could have won the game, and our smiles would have been a bit bigger and our conversation a bit more animated, but it didn’t really matter.  What mattered was the time I was spending with these friends, and the vehicle by which I met up with these friends happened to be basketball.  It could have been bridge or rummy or the 2nd episode of “House” on Fox, but it was basketball, and yet I finally realized (for real) that it wasn’t about the basketball at all.  That was just the vehicle, that one day when I get too old, I’ll trade in for the vehicle of golf.  I realized driving home from the pizzeria that evening that the reason I played in the first place was the friendships that are developing.  And I went home much more satisfied than even if we had won the game.

But I still hope the Steelers don’t learn this principle this year.

Billy Atis

I haven’t known Will (Billy) Atis long, but in the last 6 months, I know there’s a lot to like about the guy. I met him playing basketball at the YMCA with the Alpha guys and the guy who made me get irritated by Jesus, but he’s been great to play with and we’ve had several conversations off the court too. Billy is originally from new Jersey, and currently lives in Worcester and works in Framingham as a chemist. I’m sure there’s more to learn, but here are three reasons why I think you should know Billy Atis:

1. He’s compassionate.
You can just tell that he has a big heart for people when you talk to him. I’m sure he’s not perfect, and he does like to call a lot of fouls on the basketball court, but behind all that, it’s pretty easy to see that this guy cares. Now if only his job at the chemistry lab could see that.

2. He likes kids.
Billy has a child, a 6 year old son, as a matter of fact. He wants to be the best dad he can be, and he also coaches soccer on his sons team.

3. He is scared of marriage.
Not everything on the “3 reasons you should know” posts need to be positive or negative. Billy has a problem. he’s scared of marriage. I mean really scared of marriage. So scared that when I talked to him about this blog post, he’s the one that brought it up. So for our discussion today, I’d like you to share with Billy why he shouldn’t be afraid of marriage or why he should continue to be afraid…be very afraid.

So let ‘er rip. What would you say to Billy?

Thinking of Jesus can be so irritating sometimes. Like in the midst of my heart turning hateful toward my enemies, and His words about loving them, even if they have persecuted me, come rushing into my mind.  For real, that is really irritating.  I was thinking about this a few days ago after I viewed an altercation that came to blows on the basketball court a few days back.  It started normally enough.  Two guys begin mouthing off to one another about a foul or a travel or whether or not Charles Barkley is fat or big-boned, and then it progresses into this full out altercation, complete with balls flying across the room (basket, that is) and fists following shortly after that.  Several guys were more than enough to put a stop to the pugilist fair, but I stayed away as my mind raced to the time I had a brief arguing session with the guy who threw the first punch.

It hadn’t been that long ago, maybe 3 months.  He had just started playing with our group, and apparently he wanted to make a name for himself or something, because it seemed like his mouth aimed at every person he played against.  So I finally decided to stick my words back in his mouth.  Thankfully (as I found out a few days ago) I eventually walked away, and then, as if to pour salt on the wound, I thought of Jesus and those irritating words again:  “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” This is what happened next:

Marty:  Ummm, Jesus, would you mind taking those words out of my mind please?
Jesus:  You should go to Him and apologize.
Marty:  Oh sure, apologize because he has a big mouth, I’ll do that (with a snort).
Jesus:  Have you ever had a big mouth?
Marty:  Every Sunday morning actually, and possibly a few other times, ya know, with my sisters, and maybe a few others times on the basketball court.
Jesus:  So go to him, apologize and Marty, it won’t just help him, it will help you, and the hate you have in your heart right now.
Marty:  But wait, there are people in the world who are just big jerks…
Jesus:  And it’s your personal job to teach them a lesson?
Marty: (walks immediately over to the future Muhammad Ali and apologizes)

Watching the argument take place yesterday, and realizing that after I apologized to said quarreler, we became good acquaintances on our way to friends, I begin to understand that Jesus words are not posted on paper for some uber spiritual, hard to understand reason.  They are there for you and me, so that our hearts stay whole and not ripped to shreds (think Tom Riddle), making future relationships impossible to grow.  They are there because He knows the way the world works, and we don’t.  But still…

It’s irritating sometimes.

Today I acted like the Alpha Male Car Salesman.

Please forgive me.

Last night I played basketball after life group.  My team had a game, and so I decided I would play in it.  I have tons of thoughts going through my head right now about the value of teamwork that I’m learning from this team, my life group, and my church in general, but I’ll save that for a later date.

We were bringing the ball down for the last time, the game was locked up, and we had successfully beaten our rival team (the Green shirts).  The buzzer sounded, and just then I turned around to see our senior statesman on the team being thrown down for no apparent reason by a green shirt boy wonder 25 years his junior.  Senior statesman, a man I greatly respect, was pretty mad when he scraped himself off the ground.  I was mad too, actually, as Green shirt boy wonder stared Senior Statesman down and mouthed the words “What’s his problem?”

“Well,” I thought to myself with immediate disdain for Green shirt wonder boy, “for no apparent reason you have just thrown a man 25 years your senior about 5 feet and down to the ground (and continuing in my thoughts I added), stupid Green shirt wonder boy.”

It is in these moments I wonder what to do.  Because I want to get up in his face and ask him why he didn’t shove me that far, to which of course he would say,  “I will” and the fun would be had by all.  Or I could let it play out, and just sit by and rejoice that we won the game.  But I really want to help our Senior Statesman out, plus I know I also have the back of Policeman Hercules on our team.  Also I don’t want to be like Alpha males Marine or Car Salesman. Yet the headline, “Pastor in Holden goes to jail for a public fighting display,” doesn’t sound so appealing either.

So it played out how it played out and I’m sitting here at my computer sharing with you the story of my evening, and I wonder, with all the honesty you can muster…

Just exactly how you would have let it play out?