I have had a fair number of events happen in my life lately, and several future bulletins have become obvious to me, but none are more amusing than the tale of Dave and Randy, twilight golfers!

Did you know that Dave Dugas golfs? He's not a bad golfer, either, and should have beaten me the last time we went out, which was Thursday. First let me digress a bit and tell you about a different Dave - my favorite cousin Dave who was very close to my exact age and likely my best mend while I was growing up. That Dave also golfed with me, and while I have always preferred orange golf balls he preferred yellow ones (yes, Dave Dugas does too, interesting coincidence). My cousin Dave is who my son Dave is named after, too, so if it seems there are entirely too many Daves in my bulletins that's probably why you need a scorecard.

In any case, the Dugas Dave and I were out Thursday golfing the afternoon away. We started at 1:00 with a yellow ball for him and orange for me. You can imagine how well that (didn't!) go over with the yellow and orange leaves all over the ground! So we switched to white. Dave had some spectacular shots. While he did manage to chip into the cup from off the green on hole 3, he also had four stunning tree shots where the ball was clearly headed outta the fairway into deep woods but nailed a trunk just right to bounce it neatly back into play. On another occasion, his shot was a worm burner heading straight for its doom at the bottom of a stream when it hit a rock right at the edge of the water, jumped about IS feet into the air, and landed in great position on the other side. With luck like that, combined with his all around fine playing in general, it was no surprise I fell a good handful of strokes behind.

However, it never occurred to me that we wouldn't have time to get in 18 holes. About the 15th hole (with Dave in the lead) the sun went down behind the trees. By the 16th hole that creepy twilight had come up on us and at the 17th we were thinking we'd never finish. On the 18th hole it was so dark we had to squint and peer and hope the golfers ahead of us were off the green so we could hit safely (it was a par 3, even!). It was just about pitch black.

So what has this got to do with anything, you might ask? Well, the darker it got the less risky shots I took. Dave doesn't have a healing broken elbow and can out hit me (I know, I know, excuses, excuses!), but I started to play "safe". I hit half-swing shots where I could keep better control of the ball. In other words, I didn't try to pound the ball all the way to the green, but instead just laid it out straight and easy so it would be in the middle of the fairway. Dave played pretty much like he had all game, and had an evil hook plaguing him all day off the tee that took him way off to the left, worse than I had seen him do all year. It was so dark we could have almost stepped on his ball before we could find it (several times we never did) but mine was easy to find shot after shot, because I was very careful to keep it straight even if I knew it wasn't going to make the distance I needed. Dave had trouble even seeing the ground (yes it was that dark!) and kept dubbing his shots. He would try to recover by hitting the ball even harder, and would dub again. When he DID connect, it would sail off into the darkness. By the end of our round, he'd lost a handful of balls (but over the day we'd found two for every one we lost, so no biggie, besides we were losing WHITE balls and who cares) and racked up enough extra strokes that I snuck up and beat him.

My point? We likely lead "winning" lives but what will happen if the world becomes a lot more hostile to us? Is just living as we do good enough? What if the world becomes even darker still and Godless? Should we just go on living the way we are and hope for the best? It seems to me that in reality the darker it gets the more important it is to live even closer to the gospel! Especially when you can't see much else around you that has any light in it. We should start playing it a little safer, but not stop altogether! Always move straight toward the goal but keep control of our lives. While we do have many liberties in Christ, perhaps we should let some of them go in order to stay on the course and not become lost. Think about it.

Randy