Every Shift

Every shift, you're a quarterback, reading the defensive scheme, seeing where the play is headed, not where it is. You know the nuances of your receivers, you know their speed, you know where they need the ball placed, and you put the ball where only your guy can get it.

Every shift, you're a receiver. Finding the soft spot in the zone, creating space between you and the defender. You know there's a safety waiting to line you up, so you receive the pass in stride and immediately protecting the ball with your body, you get your eyes up field.

Every shift, you're a safety. Reading the eyes of the quarterback, determining where he wants to go without letting on that you know what he's thinking. You wait for just the right second, baiting the quarterback into the pass, and you light up the receiver to separate him from the ball.

Every shift, you're a running back, advancing the ball, dancing around the defense where they can't even touch you, protecting the ball, using your balance, your speed, your awareness of every player around you. You pull the defense off balance, wait for them to make the first move, and you react.

Every shift, you're a defensive lineman, knowing what gap you're responsible for, staying aggresively responsible in your coverage and pursuit of the ball. If you can't take the ball, then you'll separate the man from the ball.

Every shift, each of the responsibilities above, is what a hockey player does. This is why I love hockey. Every shift of it.

Government

1. If I were a Christian lawmaker, and it was up to me to allow or disallow issue "X", am I morally required to make issue "X" illegal because I know that "X" is a sin against God?

I say no. I say the purpose of the law is to protect the liberty of the people under the law. The law is not meant to drive morality. Not only is not meant to, but it can't. You can't create moral people from from the top down. Morality is created from the bottom up, by changing the individual people under the law.

My point here, is that I think many people confuse what government should be. It shouldn't be in the business of enforcing a moral code. It should be in the business of creating an environment where all moral codes can co-exist, so long as the rights of every individual are preserved. And if you as an individual know that "X" is a sin against God, that's fine, and you should go about changing the people under the law so that they don't have hearts which want to do "X". The key difference here is that supporting a government that allows "X", does not mean that you morally condone "X". A societies' morality comes from the bottom up, not from the top down.

Live and Learn

It's funny how the process redefines the goal. I begin a task with an objective in mind (a career path, physically creating something, writing something, anything really), but along the way reality chips away at the either a) the perceived value of the original goal, or b) the perception of how easily the goal can be attained (the cost). Either way, the scale tends to slowly tip more and more towards the cost side as we move further from theory and closer to reality. Once it passes the "breakeven" point, the goal is dropped, right?

However, something else happens along the way. So maybe the original goal was scrapped due to one of the above, but we then are able to re-define a new goal based on either a) a more realistic appreciation of future value, or b) a more realistic estimate of the cost to attain that value.

I know this is nothing ground-breaking here, but it's just interesting how many places in life this happens.

As usual, my rantings can summed up in a simple cliche, such as "live and learn", but I still think its interesting to write it all out. I mean heck, I opened up this page to write about something entirely different, but ended up with this.

I should be working right now....

Is this thing on?