This is the trophy you take home from the tournament when your team takes six straight losses.
Love hurts, or so the saying goes.
One of my favorite activities here is Ultimate Frisbee. It’s a sport that I enjoyed very much back in the States (and plan on enjoying there once more as I come into my extended stay Stateside), it’s a sport that is popular among a hard-core group here in Germany, and it’s a social sport in ways that other sports cannot provide. You are not required to play every point – so you spend a lot of time talking to people on the sideline. You are not required to drag around a lot of equipment – a simple Discraft frisbee will do, and it fits anywhere for convenient carrying. And Frisbee players do not generally consider themselves athletes, so nobody has any reservations about going out to the pub together after practice and undoing all the hard work and sweat they just suffered.
The Tübingen team has been especially good place for starting our community at Unterwegs… namely in that, while some teams focus on competition, our team prefers to focus on the going out to the pub part of the game. The Maultaschen (whose website was made by yours truly) have been a fantastic source of community for Unterwegs – the only rather major downfall being a serious scheduling conflict between practices and our Thursday night program.
Anyway, I have suffered my share for the team in my efforts to bridge the two communities. First, there was the open eyebrow which, long story, I pulled the stitches out of myself. Now, after a long weekend tournament in Nuremberg, I have a nice scab extending down most of my calf from sliding on the sun-baked grass.
So here’s my question: how many discs would Jesus dive for to show his Ultimate Frisbee team that he loves them? Because that hurts. And that’s what love is.