oasisCHURCH

Father of the Century

In fathering my children I always try to make a conscious effort to be like Christ, but if I should happen to fall short of that goal, I want to be like Dick Hoyt. This is one of the most amazing stories I have read in a long, long time. Be sure to read the article below the video, then click on the video to watch a very emotional and inspiring illustration.

Article by Rick Reilly, Sports Illustrated columnist

I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to pay for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots.

But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.

Eighty-five times he's pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he's not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars — all in the same day.

Dick's also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. on a bike. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?

And what has Rick done for his father? Not much — except save his life.

This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.

"He'll be a vegetable the rest of his life," Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. "Put him in an institution."

But the Hoyts weren't buying it. They noticed the way Rick's eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. "No way," Dick says he was told. "There's nothing going on in his brain."

"Tell him a joke," Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain.

Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? "Go Bruins!" And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, "Dad, I want to do that."

Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described "porker" who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. "Then it was me who was handicapped," Dick says. "I was sore for two weeks."

That day changed Rick's life. "Dad," he typed, "when we were running, it felt like I wasn't disabled anymore!"

And that sentence changed Dick's life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.

"No way," Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren't quite a single runner, and they weren't quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway, then they found a way to get into the race officially: In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year.

Then somebody said, "Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?"

How's a guy who never learned to swim and hadn't ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried.

Now they've done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii. It must be a buzzkill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don't you think?

Hey, Dick, why not see how you'd do on your own? "No way," he says. Dick does it purely for "the awesome feeling" he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together.

This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992 — only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don't keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time.

"No question about it," Rick types. "My dad is the Father of the Century."

And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries was 95% clogged. "If you hadn't been in such great shape," one doctor told him, "you probably would've died 15 years ago."

So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other's life.

Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass., always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father's Day.

That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy.

"The thing I'd most like," Rick types, "is that my dad would sit in the chair and I would push him once."

The BIG Week

I have been excited for weeks anticipating the move to our new place of gathering on Sundays. This weekend DO NOT FORGET TO REMIND YOURSELF that you will be driving to the Meigs Middle School in Pomeroy for our Oasis gathering, not the American Legion building in Middleport.

During the first few months there will no doubt be some bugs to work out and things to get used to in our new place of meeting, so bear with us. But we will certainly make the most of the space we will have.

What to expect this Sunday when you come to the Oasis gathering:

• Come in the main office entrance and go directly to the cafeteria first.
  We will be sure to have a couple of guys out front directing you to where you should enter the building. We are working on getting a few signs made, and they will hopefully be ready by the middle of September.

As always, we will have coffee and breakfast, so if you want to have some time to hang out and check out the new digs, plan on coming early, at least by 9:45 or so. If you would like to join the worship team for prayer, be sure to come by 9:30 and meet us just behind the stage curtains. The fellowship I experience before and after the Oasis gathering continues to be the highlight of my Sunday every week.

At 10:00am we will officially begin our worship gathering with some clear directions about where everything is taking place. You will want to know where the younger children are going to meet during the teaching, and where the older children will be, and of course, you’ll want to know where the bathrooms are once that coffee begins to kick in.

• A celebrative time of worship and praise.
  We recognize that it is GOD who builds His church, and He is responsible for every bit of the growth Oasis has experienced. Therefore we want to respond with exuberant thankfulness and give Him the praise His name is worth. The worship team is excited to lead you in worship in the cafeteria of the Middle School, and as the choruses of praise echo down the hallways of the public educational building we will long and pray that His glory be revealed in all of Meigs County.

• A new 5-part teaching series.
  This week I will introduce the Oasis people and the newcomers to the Oasis gatherings to The Kind of Church Oasis Strives to Be, beginning this Sunday with reflections on what it means to be a God Centered Church. Week 2: A Christ Exalting Church. Week 3: A Bible Saturated Church. Week 4: A Soul Winning, Missional Church. Week 5: A Justice Pursuing Church.

• A little bit of uncertainty.
  Let’s be realistic, no one knows for certain how this is going to go. There will be some learning curves, and we will need some time to adjust to the new surroundings. But having a few minor uncertainties is just life. The thing we can be absolutely certain about is that Oasis is God’s church. Yes, Oasis is just one of the many local churches God holds in His sovereign hand, but we are God’s nonetheless. That means we can be certain that He will sustain us and lead us in everything we do. We are not a perfect people who have everything figured out and put together just right. We merely strive to be faithful people who love God and love people, living according to the grace God has given us and extending that same grace to others who are far from perfect and almost as screwed up as we are.

I hope you will join us this Sunday. If you do not know how to get to the Meigs Middle School which is right behind the Meigs High School on Pomeroy Pike Road, then you can click this link to see a map and directions. This is what you are looking for:

Activity

This has been an eventful week for many in the Oasis Fellowship. Several folks have served the community through working at various booths at the Meigs County Fair, several have been sending and handing out Oasis post cards like there's no tomorrow (I suppose that is always a possibility, so good for you), and some have served by helping with one or both of the Oasis events this week. The first was the worship band's concert on Thursday night at the fair. We all had a great time, and we hope several people had the opportunity to connect with God, even if in just a brief way.

Then yesterday evening there were several Oasis folks at the Middleport Pool cooking hot dogs, preparing dinner plates and handing them out, stuffing school-supplies bags and handing them out, carrying coolers full of pop and water, having conversations with people and inviting them to consider connecting with God through Oasis in some way. We handed out over 100 bags of free school supplies, and still have over 100 bags left. Thank you for helping us serve our community.

Oasis BodyLife & News

For some reason I am having trouble with my Outlook 2003 program not wanting to send emails to my distribution lists. Therefore I will be posting my email news items here until I get the problem resolved. Sorry for the inconvenience. I hope most of you who receive my emails also check the web site regularly.

The next couple of weeks are going to be very exciting for our fellowship. We are in the midst of a pretty big transition. For three years our church, which began with a handful of 15 or so people, has met on Sundays at the Post 128 American Legion Building in Middleport. We started gathering in the evenings for worship, teaching, and prayer, and eventually moved to meeting on Sunday mornings there. Along the way we have had many more people come to consider Oasis Christian Fellowship as their “home” church. Lately we have recognized a pretty significant increase in those who desire fellowship with Oasis. Therefore we have taken the proactive step to move our gatherings to a place that will better facilitate our current and impending growth. The new Sunday gathering place for Oasis Christian Fellowship will be the Meigs Middle School in Pomeroy.

One week from this Sunday, August 27, will be our first worship service at the Meigs Middle School. Our hope is that you will take this transitioning opportunity to invite new guests to our Oasis gathering. We have provided 1000 postcards to help you in this process. A few weeks ago I issued a challenge for everyone to take at least 5 cards and use them as personal invitations to five different families or individuals. I took the challenge myself, and this week I mailed 23 postcards to various friends, some who have been to one or two Oasis meetings, but most of which have never been to an Oasis gathering. I plan to follow up most of those postcards with a phone call, which will hopefully open the door for conversation about the church. I hope you will do the same. I know that for most of you that is a very uncomfortable and awkward thing to do. There are a few natural evangelists who thrive on this stuff, but most of you are like me I suspect. It actually takes effort, and you have to make yourself talk to someone new. I confess that’s how I am too. But for the Gospel it is well worth the discomfort. And the more you do it the easier it gets. So take a BIG handful of cards. LOL.

The last thing I want to share with you is something I mentioned this past Sunday at the conclusion of our gathering. At that first meeting at the new place on August 27 we will begin a series of teachings called: The Kind of Church Oasis Strives to Be. The series will consist of five different GOALS for our fellowship, and each week we will focus in on one of those goals: (1) A God-centered church, (2) A Christ-exalting church, (3) A Bible-saturated church, (4) A soul-winning, missional church, and (5) A justice-pursuing church. During this series we will hear from a variety of different speakers, and will be challenged to continue our pursuit of each of those vital goals. Also, this will most likely be a time when several new people will be visiting our fellowship, so the series should be a timely one as well.

Be sure to refresh your memory of the news items below. I look forward to seeing you this Sunday for our last gathering in the American Legion Building. If you haven’t been with us in a while I encourage you to come back for this one. We are going to have a wonderful time together. Bring breakfast, bring the kids, grandkids, the whole family. Come ready to worship and celebrate a new season in the life of the Oasis church!!!