for Quinn

There is something in us that both fears and laments change. We prefer familiar flannel, pulling worn bedclothes snuggly around us and settling into broken-inness. The familiar beckons us with come in, stay for awhile. But such comfort may also become a siren’s song, drawing us into stay forever.

C. S. Lewis writes:

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad. 

We must be hatched or go bad. These words ring particularly true for me these days. I am watching my son hatch, for he has refused to go bad. Quinn inherited genes from his birth parents that have blessed him with incredible athleticism. Although most football parents live in constant fear of the next hit, they also live for those glorious moments of the blitz gone well, the perfect block, and the break-away run. Quinn has given us many of those moments in the past ten years.

Quite simply, Quinn was meant to be a football player. Every fiber in his being yearns for the gridiron. When he was recruited to play Division II football, he was eager for the opportunity to better himself on the college stage. Only that opportunity never materialized, for coaches in three different college programs refused to see him. You cannot prove yourself if you will not be seen.

In each program, Quinn was told that he was an incredible athlete, a hard worker, a coachable player, and a responsible student athlete. We had agonizing conversations during which Quinn would say, I don’t know what else to do or to try, and I would bite my tongue to keep the platitudes I’d used before from spilling out. After year-round conditioning and practicing, I knew that my son could no longer stomach You can only do your best. He had been doing his best, giving his all for years, and this had produced a mere one minute and 37 seconds of varsity football play. It had relegated him to limited junior varsity play (because in spite of your age, talent, and experience, you are new to our program, because you need to pay your dues, because, because, because. . .) and hours of sideline anticipation that melted in nothing but spectatorship.

Quinn’s collegiate football career was a bust. If you measured it by time spent on the varsity field, that is. I used to lie awake at night wondering how someone so deserving–athletically and personally–could go unseen over and over again. Many nights, I worked myself into an angry lather, drafting and delivering righteous speeches of condemnation to coaching staffs in three universities.

Football, for Quinn, was familiar. Among his fellow teammates, in weight rooms, and on football fields, he could be an ordinary, decent egg. After five years of futility, however, Quinn decided to hatch, for he understood–all too well–that to remain an egg was to go bad. With three weeks to go in his fifth year of college football, he finally quit.

And then his hatching began in earnest. He set his sites on shaping the familiar football self into a teacher and coach, into an adult whose painful past experiences would whet his resolve for change.

To say that I admire Quinn is most certainly an understatement. I have seen, firsthand, what the past five years have cost him–physically and emotionally. And yet, his story is our story. Most of us have clung to the familiar until we simply could not. Then it was hatch or go bad. Change or stagnate into sweet and suffocating decay.

Viktor E. Frankl writes that when we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. As one who survived three years in Auschwitz and several other concentration camps, Frankl was painfully aware that he could not change his situation. He believed, however, that people are primarily driven by striving to find meaning in one’s life.  This meaning, he argued, was the reason that many were able to overcome their circumstances, even those as horrific as those in ghettos and concentration camps.

The challenge to change ourselves is a call for risk-taking and egg-hatching. It is, ultimately, a call for the growth born from striving to find meaning in one’s life.

When I see my son standing alongside the other coaches on the sidelines at the high school football game, I see the tangible, positive proof of change. And just as his father and I lived through those glorious moments of tackles and touchdowns, we will live though even more glorious moments of watching him pass on his knowledge and indomitable spirit to others.