CHARACTER BUILDING
Life is full of “what ifs”. What if this had happened, what if that had worked out, what if I would have… etc. In New Bern, NC we have an awesome group of people that make up the community known as Craven Chains Disc Golf Club (www.cravenchains.com). This club has developed leaps and bounds over the years and had extremely humble beginnings.
Many people don’t even know what disc golf is. Go to www.pdga.com to get a better idea. I call it poor man’s golf! No green fees, no carts, no fancy clothes, low budget equipment and many free public courses! We have an awesome group of people that have contributed to the development of the Glenburnie Disc Golf Course. This course is located in a public park and the city has given us permission to maintain, upgrade, run public events and utilize the course as needed to increase knowledge of the sport in the local area and beyond. The presence of the disc golf community has decreased the crime and sketchy people hanging around the park and has made it a more aesthetically pleasing and safer place for families to enjoy.
These results come from selfless people volunteering countless hours of course maintenance, scraping and scratching to get local sponsors to help fund these efforts and events and learning to utilize the talents each person has to work together to accomplish a common goal. We invest a ton of our own resources (time, talent and treasures). It has been a beautiful tapestry in the making…and it keeps getting better! The diversity in the group is the most awesome part. This community has a wide age range from teens to grandparents and a wide range of professions and skill levels. It’s awesome to see how well many of these people work together all with the purpose of making our community better.
The character traits that are built in these kinds of situations are amazing. It would have been nice if everything was done for us, if the course was perfect when we got there and didn’t need all the maintenance, if sponsors just gave us tons of money and we didn’t even have to interact (and practically beg), if someone else ran all of the weekly, monthly and main events on our behalf, if all of the admin work behind the scenes wasn’t necessary….etc. You get the point. If all of that stuff was done for us, we wouldn’t have had the chance to build character, build relationships and have a greater appreciation for something that we helped develop with our own hands (and still growing).
I challenge you to embrace the opportunities that you get for character building whether it is a project, a team, a mentorship, a situation/experience (both good and bad), adversity…etc. Sometimes it’s nice to just skip to the final product or final scene but there is a lot that happens along the journey that we don’t want to miss out on too often. Your experiences influence your character. Cherish the moments!