For those of you who know me, you’ll be familiar with my love of the wonderful sport of Ultimate (Frisbee), and you may even know that I’m currently in the middle of a season of ultimate with the Newcastle men’s team, I-Beam. What this involves is several tournaments, and a lot more training, culminating at Nationals in about a month. This means that every Thursday at 5:30 am, I haul myself out of bed for fitness training, and ride to Shadders’ house so that we can get across to training for a 6:30 am start.
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This morning it was sprint training with a twist; the twist being that the sprint was up the steepest hill in the middle of Newcastle, the infamous Brown Street. It was decided that eight repetitions up the street would be enough, and we got going. Four reps in I was starting to feel pretty ragged (Martin was still going strong btw) and I walked over to one of the senior players to (wittily) comment on how much I was hurting. The reply I received was along the lines of “Come on Roger, it’s only pain…”
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This got me thinking.
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What is the point of fitness training?
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Put in its simplest terms, fitness training serves the purpose of physically preparing us for the big tournament to come. Hard work now will mean that we as a team will be better placed to still be running hard three or four days down the track; we will be better prepared for the task that is before us.
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(Here comes the point of this blog… it had to come sometime) It’s very similar for us as Christians, and for us as Newcastle Christian Students. We have a task before us, and it isn’t a small one either. There are several thousand students who attend Newcastle University, most of whom don’t know the saving grace of Jesus Christ our Lord. We as brothers and sisters in Christ are called to make sure that by the time they walk through the doors of the University, out into the world, they do know about Jesus, and have been able to make a decision on where they stand with him. Like I-Beam, the more training we put in now, the more time we spend in prayer and in reading our bibles the better we will be placed when the ‘tournament’ arrives. The better we will be placed to answer our friends when they ask us that tough question about what we believe, or contribute to a conversation when the topic of Jesus comes up in our friend groups or classes.
How convenient is it then, that NCS provides training courses aimed at preparing us for these scenarios? *Hint Hint*
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Cheers,
Ronas
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The Night Train (TNT) runs on Wednesday afternoons from 5:30 – 6:30 (After the bible talks) and offers a range of courses, from personal evangelism, to Engaging with Islam.
photo credit: Sebastian Mary
Nice very subtle hint there…
BTW, I totally recommend TNT- I learnt so much last year that has helped me in HEAPS of conversations I’ve had with friends since.