“I press on toward the goal to win the prize . . .”  Philippians 3:14 

When I entered my freshman year of high school I had a dream.  That dream was to earn, as a freshman, a varsity letter jacket in a sport, any sport, didn’t matter which one.  For a little shrimp of guy like me with only modest athletic ability it was a tall order, or what Jim Collins refers to in his book Good to Great as a BHAG, a Big Hairy Audacious Goal.  To compound the challenge I didn’t play football, freshmen were relegated to the junior varsity basketball squad, and our school did not have a baseball team at the time, which left only one sport – track, and I wasn’t very fast.  I did have, though, enough endurance to run long distance races, which was my only hope.  But despite my hard work and diligent training I still fell short, never so much as even placing in a single race.  So, by the end of my freshman year my big dream became a bust, and I was heartbroken.

Then one day during summer break the doorbell rang.  I answered the door and there to my surprise stood Coach Higdon, our school’s Athletic Director, holding a package.  “What’s this?” I asked as he presented it to me.  “It’s your letter jacket,” he replied.  “But, but I didn’t . . .” I stammered.  “It’s for golf,” he smiled before I could finish my sentence.  Golf?  I had forgotten all about that, didn’t know anyone paid attention to golf or even considered it a varsity sport.  “You guys won the district championship in golf, remember?  That earned you a letter jacket.”  I was speechless!  But it was true, we were the first golf team our school ever had and by some miraculous stroke of fate, for which my golf teammates deserve most of the credit, we had won the district championship – and my dream, my BHAG, had come true after all.  After the coach left I carried my new letter jacket into my room where, all alone, I buried my face in it and wept.

Dreams and BHAGs are sometimes fulfilled in unexpected ways.  As Julia Cameron explains in her book The Artist’s Way, “We shake the apple tree, but sometimes the universe delivers oranges.”  More plain spoken about the shaking of the apple tree, the Apostle Paul simply says, “I press on toward the goal to win the prize.”  But the prize is sometimes a surprise, a bushel of oranges instead of apples, and often a more meaningful award than we ever dreamed, like my high school letter jacket.  Even more reason to keep pressing on; for God’s BHAG’s are always bigger and more expansive than our own.

“Carry each other’s burdens . . .”  – Galatians 6:2 

One of the positive things about aging – and yes there are a few – is the acceptance of and appreciation for help from others.  As one who has always been reluctant to ask for help, believing it to be a sign of weakness, this has been a huge transformation for me.  Two lessons I have learned through this process are that one, age is not the reason I need, accept, and appreciate help; rather it is that with age I finally wised up to the fact that we all need help from others regardless of our age, and that accepting help is a sign of strength and wisdom, not weakness.  And two, in my determination to do everything on my own, I felt little inclination to recognize, much less to help others in need.

There is an old Scottish tale I once read about a small girl trudging along carrying a young boy in her arms not much smaller than herself.  A passerby, noticing the girl toting such a heavy load for her size, expressed concern that it might be too much for her.  But the girl joyfully replied in her thick Scottish accent, “He’s na heavy.  He’s mi brither.” . . .   Notably, it was that same Scottish parable that would eventually inspire the familiar hit song recorded by The Hollies in 1969, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.”

“The road is long,” the lyrics say, “With many a winding turn / That leads us to who knows where? . . . But I’m strong / Strong enough to carry him / He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother / So on we go / His welfare is my concern / No burden is he to bear / We’ll get there / For I know / He would not encumber me / He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother / If I’m laden at all / I’m laden with sadness / That everyone’s heart / Isn’t filled with gladness / Of love for one another . . . And the load / Doesn’t weigh me down at all / He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.

As a young man I was convinced that it was up to me to make my own way.  But as life has taught me, no one should ever think that he or she is totally independent and doesn’t need help from others.  Nor should anyone feel excused from the task of helping others.  For God has surely placed us on this earth to help each other along the way, or as the Apostle Paul puts it, to “carry each other’s [our brothers’ and sisters’] burdens.”  The Scottish girl had figured out at a young age what has taken me a lifetime to learn, “He’s na heavy.  He’s mi brither.”

“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded . . .”  – Luke 12:48 

“You will be like God,” the notorious serpent assured Eve in the garden, thus enticing she and Adam to take a bite of the fruit God had clearly forbidden them to eat.  Ever since that incident that precipitated the fall of mankind almost every child starting around age two has carried on the tradition of believing they too can be like God.  Anyone who has ever been involved in raising or teaching small children knows what I’m talking about.  And one of the symptomatic behaviors of that age is the demanding phrase “I want!”  I want a cookie, I want that toy, I want ice cream, I want you to swing me.  In our household we refer to it as having a case of the “I wants.”

One of our grandchildren happened to be going through that stage of the “I wants” a few years ago when I saw an opportunity to give her a dose of her own medicine.  It happened one weekend during a sleepover at our house, when we got up early on Saturday morning and cooked up a big platter of pancakes, her favorite.  Sure enough, in the blink of an eye she grabbed the biggest one for herself and plopped it down on her plate.  That’s when I stuck out my bottom lip and cried out in a whiney voice, “But I wanted that one!!!”  My hope was that she might get a glimpse of what she sounded like when she had the “I wants,” maybe teach her a lesson.  Fast forwarding a few years, either it worked, or she eventually out-grew the “I wants” because now that whiney voiced “I wanted that one!” has become a joke between us, a trick she plays on me as much as I do her.

Now I am no child psychologist, but it seems to me that the “I want” phase can be healthy in a child’s development, that is if it is channeled properly to develop ambition and work ethic instead of becoming a spoiled brat by being given everything they want.  Likewise, ambition too can be healthy if it is channeled in such a way that leads the child to success (however that is measured).  Success, however, must not be the ultimate outcome, for success is healthy only when it is channeled toward responsibility, meaning responsibility for others – our families, neighbors, communities, for those less fortunate – that is, loving our neighbors as ourselves.  Success thrives only when it is shared, just as surely as it will die when squandered on self-gratification.  Jesus made that point crystal clear, “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.”

• Ecclesiastes 3:1 

Whew!  What a relief getting a reprieve from the scorching temperatures of the Texas summer, that relentless perpetual heat wave that seems to have no end in sight.  Not that hot summers are unusual in Texas; they are simply part of where we live.  In my lifetime, rarely have there been summers of mild temperatures and higher than normal rainfall.

If I appear to be whining about the summer heat it is because I am.  Just wait a couple of months, though, and you’ll catch me whining about having to rake the fall leaves in my yard week after week.  And by February I will be sick to death of cold weather.  Then around mid-May I’ll be complaining about my spring allergies.  Whine!  Whine!  Whine!

But here is the flip side.  I love beautiful fall days, crisp mornings, autumn colors, pumpkin flavored coffee, and football games.  It is one of my favorite seasons.  I also love cold winter days sitting by the fire reading a book, watching sports on TV, preparing for the Christmas holidays.  And I love springtime when the weather begins to warm, the days grow longer, and the outdoors begins to green up and blossom.  Then, amazingly, I even look forward to summertime once again, long days to spend outdoors, knocking around in Bermuda shorts and my favorite Keen’s sandals, cooking on the grill, eating on the patio, having picnics, or attending outdoor concerts.

Interesting, isn’t it, the push and pull of seasonal changes, how we soon grow weary and bored from day-after-day long hot days?  That’s the push.  But the anticipation of fall, crisp mornings, milder days, and early sunsets, that’s the pull.  Sometimes I think God must have created the annual seasons – winter, spring, summer, and fall – to prepare us for the seasonal changes of life – childhood to adolescence to young adulthood to middle, then old age.  There, too, we experience the push and pull of transitioning from one season to the next. . . Except, it has been the last one that has surprised me the most, even though at the top of my game having grown weary of those hard-charging middle years – the push – yet anticipating new work to do, a higher calling, accepting a more humble position within my family and community – that is the pull.  It is so true, isn’t it?  “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.”

“The purposes of a man’s heart are deep waters, but a man of understanding draws them out.”  – Proverbs 20:5 

In his newest book Resilient John Eldredge tells a story about several friends sitting on his deck one night “talking about this and that,” as he describes it, “when a woman we all know came up in the conversation.  She’s the kind of person who seems to have an internal steadiness.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen her thrown by anything.  She might seem at first to be quiet and withdrawn, but that’s only because she doesn’t need to assert herself into the center of things.  When she speaks, it seems to come from a deep resource.  There was a moment of silence, and then someone said, ‘She’s a deep well.’”

What struck me about that story when I read it was not the uniqueness of it but its familiarity.  Don’t we all know someone like that who seems to have it all together – grounded, rock-solid, quietly confident, “a deep well” as the woman was described?  But then Eldredge added a punch line, a profound truth that applies to all of us.  “Actually,” he wrote, “every human being is a deep well.  They just don’t draw upon those places within themselves because they live near the surface of their own existence.”

We have a mantra within my profession of executive coaching about the people we work with, our clients, that everyone is “creative, resourceful, and whole.”  Everyone, in other words, is a deep well, except most of us fail to recognize that depth because we tend to live too near the surface.  As coaches we challenge our clients to draw from those deeper parts of the well where answers and solutions and enlightenments dwell, as often does a greater sense of purpose.  Evoking awareness, we call it in our professional training, the calling up or summoning of what is already there, down deep.  That’s what we do.

To be clear, none of us will find all answers, solutions, or knowledge no matter how deep into the well we dive.  Indeed, we always need others to shore up our shortcomings because we all have them.  What we will discover from down deep, however, is an awareness of more capacity and capability than we realized.  For every human being is a deep well, but we must dive beneath the surface in order to draw upon it.  “The purposes of a man’s heart are deep waters, but a man of understanding draws them out,” says the Proverb.