When I was in early elementary school, the only kids in my neighborhood that were anywhere near my age were girls. I got pretty sick of watching them play Barbies. That’s why it was so exciting when a guy named Mario moved into the neighborhood. He was a few grades ahead of me, but he was my first neighborhood buddy that was a guy. It was great to finally do guy stuff…we would go exploring in the woods, play street hockey, build forts, get muddy, you name it.
One day Mario had an idea. He had a skateboard that he decided to modify. You have to understand that today’s skateboards looked nothing like the popular skateboards of back then. Today’s models are lightweight to make it easier to get them off the ground. Back then, the bigger and sturdier, the better. If a mechanic from that era misplaced the creeper that he or she would use for sliding under a vehicle, they could’ve used a skateboard as a substitute without much of a problem.
Mario’s idea was to take this giant skateboard and nail a big piece of plywood on top. After he did, it was big enough for us both to sit on it at the same time and ride down a hill. I’m not sure how we came up with the name, but we called it “The Beta Mobile.” We didn’t really know why, but it sounded cool, so we went with it. To test it out we took it over to the hill in front of the house where I grew up. The modern-day street in front of that house has speed bumps (probably because of the stuff we did on that hill), but back then there weren’t any. The hill had two parts; the first one was long and had a gentler slope, while the second one was shorter, but dropped pretty quickly.
In classic little-boy fashion, we didn’t look for a smaller hill. We just climbed on and didn’t really give much thought to how to slow down if we needed to. I sat in the front, and he sat behind me, bobsled style. We shoved off, and away we went.
We built up speed down the first hill, and we stopped accelerating as the hill flattened out, but then we hit the second hill. We sped up to where it felt like we were going to lift off the ground. To a kid that was accustomed to getting roped into playing house, this was awesome! I was having fun until Mario had another idea. Off to the side there was a house whose owner had paved a little portion of her yard so she could park another vehicle off the street, but in order to keep rainwater from running into her yard, the part that bordered the lawn formed into a big ridge. To Mario, this ridge looked like a nice big jump to try to hit with the Beta Mobile.
“Hit that jump!” He yelled, leaning toward it.
“Noooooo!” I yelled back, leaning the other way.
The way it worked out, I guess I was sitting in the better spot for steering, because we stayed on the road and flew right past the jump. The Beta Mobile slowed down as the road started sloping upward again, and we came to a stop, satisfied that we would be able to do mega-cool things with the Beta Mobile.
As we walked back up to the top of the hill for another run, I forgot about the jump. We decided we’d try to go a little faster this time, but this time we switched places and I was in the back. Again we shoved off and started picking up speed.
We flew down the first hill, and as we started down the second one, I remembered the jump, remembered that we had switched places, and I had a terrible thought. It was too late, though. As we drew near the jump, I leaned away from it about as hard as I could, but it didn’t matter. Mario had the better leverage for steering, and he pointed us toward the jump. We hit it going nearly full speed.
What happened next was something straight out of a Calvin & Hobbes comic. The bodies of two grade-school boys and a gigantic piece of plywood with wheels went tumbling and flipping through the air, crashing onto the lawn. As we lay motionless, moaning on the grass, the front door to the house across the street opened up, and a man in his 80s stepped outside, applauding and shouting “yaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyy!”
That was the last time I got on the Beta Mobile with Mario.
As you look around for ways that you can do more with your time and energy to glorify God, you’re going to have the opportunity to partner with fellow believers. For small endeavors it probably won’t be such a big deal, but as you move on to bigger projects, be sure that you’re on the same page with your co-laborers. Talk about your vision for what you’re working on together. You might both have good intent, but if you’re “leaning in different directions,” it’s probably not going to work out the way you’re all envisioning.
Follow God’s prompting, but game it out ahead of time with your partner(s). If you don’t, you might end up in a spectacular wreck, sprawled out in a daze, but your audience might not be so enthusiastic as the one we had that day.
