Ask and Ye Shall Receive

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When I was in Grade 8, due to a weird quirk in my schedule, I ended up taking Phys Ed with a class of Grade 10 boys. Now, I had already, in elementary school, been moved ahead a grade. That combined with the time of year of my birthday and the net result was that I was playing hockey, soccer, football and everything else with boys 4 or 5 years older than me.

Even in my own grade I was relatively short and skinny; don’t get me wrong though I wasn’t the a stereotypical geek. I was the leading scorer and captain of my hockey team: but that was when playing with my peers.

In the end I did fine, basketball was the biggest struggle, but I more than held my own in hockey and was far from ever being picked last when we chose teams.

At the end of the semester the teacher [Mr. C] called me into his office. For some reason [maybe a different story] the female phys ed teacher was there too. Mr. C told me that because of the fact that I was so much younger than the rest of the students in the class, he didn’t know what mark to give me for the course.

His solution was to ask me what mark I thought I should get, actually he put it more like, “You can have whatever mark you’d like…so what shall I put down?” His pen hovered above his marking book.

I knew he meant what he was saying and I got extremely uncomfortable. In my heart I knew that if I took Phys Ed with boys my age I would have received an A or A+ and I completely felt justified receiving that mark for this class.

Paralysis gripped me. I couldn’t speak at all except for, “I don’t know…uh…mmm,” and probably more ambiguous noises.

The other Phys Ed coach, who also coached the track team that I was a member of, was standing behind his chair. She started silently making an “A” symbol with her hands, to encourage me to ask for the best possible mark.

I just couldn’t do it, I couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t let what I really wanted verbalize. I’ll spare you the psycho-babble of what was behind it all, but the end result is that I walked out of that meeting with a C+ in Phys Ed, which not only really hurt on many levels, but also brought down my grade average and meant that for the only time in school I didn’t make the honor roll and all the things that came with it in my family…like love.

With 30 plus years of time in between, the letter grade has become insignificant of course, but the sting remained and I can see now that the same thing in me that made it impossible to ask for and receive what was in my heart has shaped my life ever since.

History Repeats Itself

Really the point of this story is that life really is exactly like that gym teacher. God, or whatever you want to call it sits waiting, pen at the ready, to give you exactly what you’ll ask for. There is a small catch…you have to ask for what is right, in your heart, to ask for - no fear though, your heart is free of all limitations. If you ask from your head, for something that isn’t real for you to receive, it will be ignored. But that is stuff you don’t really want anyways…you’re just pretending
to ask for it to fill up space.

I confess that, I only read about 3 blogs on a regular basis and one of them is James Brausch’s site. Last night he had a very simple and interesting post:

What Would You Like For Christmas?

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

I have no idea what to get you for Christmas.

Help me out here. What do you want from me for a Christmas gift?

-James D. Brausch

James makes a lot of very useful products for Internet business owners [you'll see many of them in my "Tools I Use" section] but I still wasn’t sure what the post was getting at. Was he really sincerely asking?

Then my mind flashed back to Grade 8 gym class and I realized that history was repeating itself, you can see for yourself how it played out this time.

Shocking to realize that the only limiting factor in my life has only ever been what I am really willing to ask for.

Thanks Mr. C and to James for the very valuable lesson,

Jon Symons

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