Chopping with an ax.by 날개단약속

I am not good at sports.

However, that does not mean that I do not like sports. Every Sunday after service, I go to a sports field and play sports, even though I only do cheer dancing or bring water.^^

This is the story about the time when I got a job after college graduation. There was a college soccer player at church, so I polished up on my basic soccer techniques every morning together with him. One day, after he had explained how to pass the ball in separate movements, he told us to pair up with another person and practice. Passing is the basic of basics so it seemed as though people already knew how to do it to some extent. The soccer player shouted out exclamations, such as “Good!” and “Nice!” and “Great!” as he walked around watching each pair. Finally, it was my turn. He had been watching me closely for a while with his mouth firmly closed before he opened his mouth to say something to me. “Move your feet as if you are using an ax to chop.”

As soon as I heard him, I thought, ‘I--who am older than him--haven’t cut anything with an ax, so I wonder if this young man has even chopped anything with an ax before.’

Then I imagined a scene of a person chopping firewood with an ax, moving up and down. The few weeks of soccer practice had finished, and a few days later I moved to another place. However, I practiced by myself against a wall, passing as if I were chopping with an ax. There is a saying that with effort, nothing is impossible, but my soccer skill was not improving, no matter how much I practiced over and over again.

Then, one day, a minister at my church happened to see me practicing.

“What are you doing?”

“I am practicing passing.”

“But why do you pass like that?”

“It’s because I was taught to pass like this.”

The minister stared at me for a while. Then, all of sudden, he grabbed my ankle and taught me in detail, step by step, and he even played as my opponent so that I could practice passing.

“How is that? Passing like this is better than what you were doing before, right?”

“You taught me well, Minister. Before I learned to pass like I was cutting with an ax...”

“Right! Cutting with an ax… it would work if you passed like that.”

“What?”

I was confused for a moment. What I was learning at that time was to push my foot in the direction from which the ball was coming, but moving my foot as if I were cutting with an ax required stepping at an angle of 90 degrees to the direction from which the ball was coming. I was dumbfounded, so I stopped the ball and asked:

“Minister, in order to chop with an ax, I have to lift the ax up and cut downwards, but now I am pushing it with my foot.”

“No, that’s not what I meant. I am talking about moving your foot as if you are chopping a tree at a 45 degree angle. Chopping up and down is for cutting firewood.”

At that moment, I realized that I had been thinking wrongly and I remembered the Teacher’s lecture. It was the lecture in which he said that when a plan is being carried out on a battlefield, if a bearing was read even one degree off, it would lead to a place that is tens of kilometers off, so the plan would fail.

Reading the compass in the wrong way is having wrong thoughts, and the harder you work with those wrong thoughts, the farther you will be from the result that you wanted and for which you had hoped. I was like that as well. I misunderstood ‘cutting with an ax’ to mean ‘cutting up and down as if chopping firewood’ and practiced soccer really intensely. However, my skill did not improve at all and, on top of that, I developed a bad habit of cutting the ball with my foot when passing.

I practiced with the Minister for another ten minutes. I had come to understand ‘cutting with an ax’ correctly, so I can see the image of myself playing on the soccer field with the vigour of a storm.

Written by Bamba-man