 |
As difficult as my last four years of grade school were for me, junior
high wasn’t much better. My luck in finding friends hadn’t
improved, and even though most of the teasing ended, the loneliness
and isolation I felt only intensified.
It would not be fair of me to blame my lack of
friends on my classmates alone. By the time I entered junior
high, I was so starved for friendship that, in my attempt to gain the
acceptance of my peers, I had become socially inept. Every
school has at least one kid whom no one likes. In my school, I
was that kid. I simply tried too hard to fit in and, in the
process, kept turning everyone off.
On the other hand, high school opened up a whole
new world for me. It all started the day Mark Campbell and Jim
and Alvin Hammill came up to me during lunch. “Hey, Steve,” one
of them said, “we’re having a Youth for Christ meeting tonight at Mike
McMahon’s apartment. Would you like to come?”
“I’m not sure.”
“It’s just down the road,” someone said, offering
me a ride.
As I walked through the front door of Mike’s
apartment later that evening, I was greeted by twenty students jammed
into the living room of a small apartment. They were getting
ready for the start of their annual “wacky auction.” Everyone
had rummaged through his or her bedroom closet and found the most
worthless items possible, including old tennis shoes and half-used
rolls of toilet paper, and had brought them to be auctioned off to the
highest bidder. And bid they did! I couldn’t believe how
much people paid. Someone had brought an old corn cob, and even
that brought 10 cents.
I left the meeting that night glad that I had
decided to go. Although I didn’t realize it then, that meeting
was a real turning point in my life. I came back the next week,
the week after that, and the week after that. I kept coming back
for the next four years, until it was time to leave for college.
Youth for Christ was important to me. It provided a place where
I could go and connect with people. I was a somebody again, with
friends to spend time with instead of always staying home and feeling
sorry for myself, wondering if life would ever improve.
I had become a Christian a few years earlier and
will discuss my conversion in a later chapter. However, I had
never experienced spiritual growth or Christian fellowship until I
joined YFC. God used that ministry to change my life, both
spiritually and socially. By the time I was a junior, it was a
popular thing to be a friend of Steve Chance. I am not bragging
about how well liked I was in high school. Just the opposite.
I am deeply humbled by how God has worked in my life, especially
during those awkward, growing-up years.
I am well aware that if it weren’t for the three
guys who brought me to my first club meeting, my life might have gone
in a totally different direction. What amazes me about my
involvement with Youth for Christ is how ready I was to belong to
something. It would have probably made no difference what kind
of group I joined, just as long as the people in that group wanted me
there. It could have been the Hare Krishnas, the Moonies, or
even someone like Jim Jones down in South America, inviting me to
drink red Kool-Aid. It just happened that the three guys who
invited me to my first youth meeting were Christians, and for that I
will be eternally grateful.
Some of my fondest memories are of my experiences
in Youth for Christ. The club went on a lot of camping trips,
and every February at least fifty kids went into northern Wisconsin
for what they called their “Sno-Ball Weekend.” The bus left the
parking lot around 7 P.M. Thursday night and pulled into camp sometime
after midnight. From then until Sunday afternoon we played in
the snow, attended seminars, and chowed down on camp food. Some
of us even managed to get a few hours of shut-eye, starting around
2:00 or 3:00 in the morning.
What I remember most about the Sno-Ball trips is
the ski slope. It wasn’t nearly as big as some of the slopes
I’ve seen in other parts of the country since then, but it was big
enough so that I knew I had to try going down it at least once.
I started out on the “bunny hill” with the other beginners and spent
most of the time lying in a snowbank, trying to figure out how to
stand up without taking off my skis. I was okay as long as I was
standing, but I did not have the strength or the coordination to get
on my feet after falling. I lasted for about an hour; after that
I was just too exhausted to keep going. I hadn’t broken any
bones, and for the rest of my life I could tell people about the time
that I skied Rib Mountain during winter camp.
As much as I liked the idea of being able to ski,
that’s how much I hated the inner-tube run. It started
three-fourths of the way up the side of the mountain and extended
across the lake. A person could top 50 miles an hour by the time
he reached the bottom if he did it right. I’ve experienced real
fear only a few times in my life, and one of those times was while
riding an inner-tube down that mountain. I was prepared for the
speed, but no one had mentioned that you bounce all over the place on
the way down. I finished my run halfway across the lake and
decided that once was enough. I spent the rest of the afternoon
in the lodge with all the staff and other campers who would rather sit
around the fire, drinking hot chocolate and talking, than to brave the
subzero temperatures outside.
The only time I remember actually being angry at
somebody at YFC, at least while I was in high school, was during a
20-mile walkathon held to raise money for the program. I worked
my tail off to raise almost $200 in pledges, which was enough to earn
a $25 prize for being one of the group’s top fund-raisers.
Because I thought it might be easier than walking from Beloit to
Orfordville, I opted to ride my 26-inch, three-wheel bike instead.
I arrived at the YFC office a little early and turned in my pledge
sheet and all the money I had collected. A few minutes later I
jumped on my bike, and twenty of us headed for the edge of town for
what I thought would be a long and exhausting day of riding.
Shortly after that, Dick Myers, director of the program, told me he
had some bad news.
“I just spoke with someone from the sheriff’s
office who said that you can’t take your bike along the main road to
Orfordville.”
“Why?”
“It’s not safe.”
“What do you mean, it’s not safe?”
“He said that with three wheels, your bike is too
wide for the main road.”
“This trip has been planned for a couple of
months!” I shouted. “You knew that I planned on riding my bike
to Orfordville. Why did you wait until the day of the trip to
tell me this?”
After arguing for another ten minutes, I finally
resigned myself to walking. “I’m afraid you can’t do that
either,” Dick admitted.
“Why?”
“Because you might hurt yourself.”
“No, I won’t!”
“We can’t take that chance.”
“Says who?” I retorted.
I was mad! Yet despite my protest, Dick
told me to get off the bike and into the van. I had spent weeks
raising money for their program, and now they wanted me to sit in a
van and watch everyone else walk. I understood that he couldn’t
do anything about the bike, but he had no right to stop me from
walking. If he was concerned about my keeping up with the group,
he should have called my parents and talked to them. Both were
at home and would gladly have laid to rest any fears about my walking
such a long distance. Instead, he took it upon himself to decide
arbitrarily what I could and could not do and humiliated me in the
process. To make matters worse, he still wanted me to collect
my pledge money and even suggested that I tell people that the few
miles I rode counted for the twenty miles everyone else walked.
Dick knew I was upset and called later that
evening. I have forgotten exactly what he said to make amends,
but I made certain that he knew never to humiliate me like that
again—not if he wanted me to be involved in YFC. Dick wouldn’t
agree to doing another walkathon, as I asked, but he did promise to
put together a bike trip for later that summer. I had something
to prove, and he owed me the chance to prove it.
Dick kept his word, and one Saturday a few months
later several of us set out on a thirty-mile bike ride. I was
such a glutton for punishment back then. The first half of the
trip was pretty easy, and I felt good when we stopped at the bottom of
a long, steep hill for lunch. I loved riding my bike, and going
downhill was the best part. There’s nothing like spending twenty
minutes going uphill in first gear, pedaling your heart out, and then
turning around and flying back down as fast as you can, with nothing
to stop you but a stop sign at the next crossroad a mile away.
Going downhill first is just not the same. It’s like eating a
pint of ice cream and then having lima beans afterwards. I can
do it, but what’s the fun of eating lima beans for dessert?
We ate a couple of hamburgers, played a few
games, and mounted up for the trip home. At least, some of the
group got on their bikes. Others of us swallowed our pride,
pushed our bikes to the top, and then got back on them for the long
ride home. By the time we arrived back in Orfordville, I thought
I was going to die. My legs felt like rubber, my arms were about
to fall off, and every muscle in my body ached from fatigue. Did
I care? Not on your life! I couldn’t remember a time when
I had felt better. I had done what I had set out to do. I
had ridden thirty miles in a single day, and no one had told me to get
into a van or said that I was going too slow for the rest of the
group. The fact is, most of the time I was ahead of somebody,
and usually that somebody was Dick Myers. Even after all these
years, it feels good to remember that he had to work just as hard as I
did to finish the trip.
I proved something to the people who were with me
that day—something that, even at age 16, I had already known for a
long time. I proved that I am capable of achieving much more in
life than most people think possible. That’s not to say that I’m
capable of doing anything I want merely because I put my mind to it.
I have a fairly realistic view of my limitations. I will never
run in the Olympics, become a brain surgeon, or give a piano concert
at Carnegie Hall. Those things are not only out of the question
for me, but they are also out of the realm of possibility for a lot of
other energetic and ambitious people, many of whom do not have
disabilities.
What it all boils down to is this: Although
I’m well aware that I cannot do certain things in life because of my
cerebral palsy, I also know that I can do many other things, if only
I’m given the chance to try. I know that I’m going to fail at
some things, and that’s okay. The only people who never fail are
people without goals, and I definitely have goals for my life.
However, my ambitions are my business. No one has the right to
decide what I can try to do but me.
|
