High Jump for Dumbies

The tension was building. The new white guy was going to show everyone how to do the high jump. It was pretty exciting, no one knew exactly what would happen. They warned him that the sand was pretty hard, but he seemed confident enough that they thought maybe he could do it and escape injury. Everyone cleared out and with great anticipation waiting. The young man traced his way back from the high jump rope in a large sweeping circle. Then with great concentration he made his approach. His technique was not exactly Olympic perfection but quite nice looking, even at the low height of the jump. He landed squarely on his upper back. He looked up stunned for a moment. Everyone kind of held their breath, more or less suppressing all out laughter. He got up slowly smiling and wincing a bit. He had avoided a real back breaking perfomance, so to speak. He made light of the situation and everyone had a good laugh. He jokingly remarked that at least now if another white person tried to show the "proper" jump technique, they could now say that another dumb white guy did, and it was not fun.
As you may have guessed by now, I am the dumb white guy (not all the time, but in this case yes). I really did do a good jump, but somehow I thought the sand was a bit softer! In our initiation week in April we looked at a different aspect of prayer every day. The first day was the Lord's prayer, I remember going over the line "And deliver us from evil". We mentioned how sometimes evil things happen to us beyond our control and we ask God to protect us. In my case I was keenly reminded how God protects us from evil that is because our own dumb mistakes! Manny and I were discussing my now funny but nonetheless sobering incident and he remarked that we only have two weeks left here and the Devil surely wants to mess it up. We need to be on our guard against temptation and dumb mistakes, and for the rest of the uncontrollables continually rely on God in prayer and trustful obedience.