W is for WEARY

Dad was a great footballer, though I never saw him play a match. By the time I was born he had already hung up the old boots, but there were still plenty of witnesses around that could testify to his ability. He was a bustling centre forward, a striker in the modern age, who put his head or foot in where others feared to tread. He played in a era when the ball only came in one colour, brown, and on a wet afternoon, weighed more than the average sack of potatoes. Boots were made for kicking the ball or man or even the referee and not just for show and they covered the foot up towards the calf. There were no floodlights, no changing rooms or showers and often the cattle had to be cleared off the pitch before kick-off. I'm not sure whether nets were used but the crowd enjoyed the craic because it was a real social occasion when the whole neighbourhood went along. Dad mostly played for a team known as Greenhall and though it wasn't the Premier League, players were recruited from far and wide, though they all spoke the same language! During his career he had one bad injury, breaking his right leg and although he eventually recovered to play again, it always looked peculiar with the lower half not pointing in the direction it should have faced. As he grew much older, he seemed to be constantly rubbing Olive Oil into his knee as the pains from years of proper care set in and tortured him constantly. Mum said that he was partly to blame for the strange shape of the leg as he had continued to try and kick a ball around casually while still in plaster and he didn't deny it.

By the time I was old enough to play with him, he was around fifty and although he couldn't have played a match he was still more than able to cope with me and could strike a ball as hard and accurately as anyone and with either foot. We often played for ages against the end gable of the house when he came home from the market with yours truly in goal for most of the time, trying to stop a succession of thunderbolts hit with the outside of his foot and swerving in on the intended target. And he loved nothing better than to see me helpless as another piledriver found the back of the net or, more correctly, knocked another piece of dash off the wall. Once his accuracy left him and the ball would go flying past the gable and land on the kitchen floor in the middle of a pile of glass that had accompanied it through the window. But it was an extremely rare occurrence for him to miss the target and I could only imagine that he terrorised many a defence during his time. Mostly he played in the brown boots that he had worn to market but sometimes appeared in his wellington boots and he was still a handful. However as we both got older, he ran after the ball less and less, was more content to be the goalkeeper and our sessions got shorter until they finally stopped. But I still remember them vividly, always glad he found the time and am just sorry that his senior years eventually made him weary.

I found myself thinking about him now that my own lads are growing up. And I remember too the time I spent with them in the garden, shooting in to the nets or throwing a rugby ball about. There was a time when after dad would retire to the house, I would play on for hours on my own till I too got weary and had to call it a day. But as I have got older, the weariness sets in just a little bit earlier every year and I now understand why, despite my pleadings, he knew when to stop.

Sometimes I get weary in my spiritual struggle, when I lose my energy for the fight and when I just don't seem to have the strength to keep on kicking away the fiery darts. But Paul encourages me as he writes to the Galatians by saying, 'Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.' and Isaiah tells me to look to God for my help when he writes, 'He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak,' while God himself tells Jeremiah, ' I will refresh the weary and satisfy the faint.' And when Jesus announces, 'Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,' then I know that the weariness is only for a short time. Tomorrow there's another game to play.