Roller Coaster Disaster

Greetings in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  I know I said I would write more thoughts for the day yesterday, but I am just now getting to them.  I have thought up several topics I want to tell you all about, but I am only going to include one that is a little longer in this post.   

This one comes from an old memory of a personal experience.  I was folding laundry the other night, and realized I am down to one nice John Deere t-shirt.  All my others have been used for work, sports, or other activities where they have become stained, ratty, or just plain worn out.  Now for those of you who know me, this is a serious problem because I love my John Deere t-shirts and need to get some more soon.  However, I started thinking back to when I bought this particular JD t-shirt.  It was my senior year of high school for physics class.  Now I know that probably does not make a lot of sense, needing a JD t-shirt for physics class.  However, it was a necessity.  There are three things you need to know for this story.  One, every year the physics teacher offered the class the chance to build a ball-bearing roller coaster and enter it in a competition.  I will fully explain what a ball-bearing roller coaster is in a bit.  Two, I had gone to the competition when my older sister was in the class and watched the competition between all the different ball-bearing roller coasters.  Three, I was the only student in the physics class my senior year.  So the teacher asked me if I wanted to build a ball-bearing roller coaster, and since I had seen the competition I definitely said yes.  Also, if you knew me well when I was growing up, you would know I spent most of my day, every day, building all kinds of cool projects, inventions, buildings for my tractors, forts for my G.I. Joes, and anything I could think of with everyday simple objects.  I know they probably never looked very cool, but to me they were priceless and my imagination made up for what my art skills lacked.  So, being just a big kid at heart, which is still true to this day, I was very excited to build my own ball-bearing roller coaster.  My teacher let me pick two friends who had study hall the same period I had the class to come in and help me.  I picked my two friends Tank and Nolansky.  Since I was the only one in the class, I got my choice of theme for the roller coaster, and so I picked John Deere.  Now I will explain a ball-bearing roller coaster.  It started with a four by six sheet of plywood as my base.  I painted this base green with a huge John Deere logo in yellow on it.  Then I used PVC pipe for the frame.  Then on the inside of the PVC frame, the contest is to build a track for the ball-bearing to run on.  A ball-bearing for those who might not know is a metal ball about the size of a marble.  The challenge is that you do not just build a track, but you also include tricks, jumps, elevators, and other cool things for the ball-bearing to do as it runs its course from start to finish only using simply physics to make everything work.  You cannot use anything battery operated or mechanical.  So for example, the elevator was PVC pipe that had a smaller piece of PVC inside it, that when the ball-bearing would roll into the hole in the bottom of the elevator, it would hit a trip that let a stack of metal washers fall.  The washers were tied to the small piece of PVC so as the washers fell, it would pull the small piece and ball-bearing to the top where the ball-bearing would be spit out onto a new piece of track at the top of the elevator.  I had several tricks including two or three jumps, a double loop in the track, stairs that the ball would roll perfectly down without skipping any, a spiral tube that the ball-bearing would roll threw, a plink-o board, and a special trick.  The special trick was that there were two balls used, which was allowed, the first ball landed on a mouse trap which tripped a spring loaded sling shot that shot the second ball to a funnel where it would go around and around before finally dropping on to the next section of track.  The start was a bucket of corn that we picked the ball out of and put it in the first elevator and the finish was a feeding trough I built from scratch which was supposed to represent the movement of corn from the bucket to the trough through the whole track.  Now the pieces of track and elevators and such were the same pieces used every year, because as soon as the competition was over, I had to tear apart my roller coaster and put all the pieces back into the huge box, so the class the next year could try to use the same pieces in their own creation of a roller coaster.  So I had limited resources to work with, and they were all just common items such as corner trim, tubing, funnels, mouse traps, washers, clothes pins, Jenga blocks, cardboard, metal dryer venting, pop cans, fishing line etc.  Hopefully, all of that explanation has made sense.  I also had John Deere tractors set up in and on the roller coaster, and all three of us guys wore John Deere t-shirts when we went to the presentation.  So that is how I came to own that certain JD t-shirt.  Now all of that was simply the explanation and build up to the actual story I want to share with you. 

My two friends and I spent several hours every day, before school, after school, during study halls, during lunch working on this roller coaster.  We did this for weeks until we had it build, painted, and fine tuned so everything worked exactly how it was supposed to.  The jumps all landed perfectly, the elevators tripped just right each time, the slant of the stairs made sure it landed on each one, the ball-bearing did not get stuck anywhere, and it did not jump off the track anywhere.  We had it so it would work every time.  That is one part of the competition, you are given three chances for the ball-bearing to make it from start to finish in a certain amount of time without you touching it or guiding it.  We had run it many, many times since everyday a new couple of friends wanted to see how it would work.  This was good because it worked out all the final kinks and places of troubles.  The competition was held on a Saturday in Ames on Iowa State University campus.  We all showed up, loaded the roller coaster into the trailer, being pulled by the school’s SUV, and the four of us, us three guys and the teacher, headed to Ames.  We stopped for lunch and had a great morning riding up there laughing with the teacher.  Then when we got to the competition, we were laughing because the teacher had one heck of a time backing the trailer up to the dock where we were to unload it.  We were all laughing as he finally got out and let Nolansky, who is a farm kid, back the trailer up.  In a matter of seconds we went from laughing and having a great day to the whole day being ruined as we opened the trailer door.  We opened it expecting to unload our perfectly fine-tuned roller coaster and be ready for the competition, but we found such a mess it did not look anything like what we loaded.  During the ride, the bouncing of the trailer, had caused one of our elevators to come unglued from the frame and collapse perfectly through the middle of the coaster tearing down tracks and tricks with it.  I could have cried, and had my two friends not been standing there beside me, I think I might have.  I had spent so much time on this, was truly proud of it, and it was ruined.  I honestly asked my professor to just shut the trailer door; we would watch the competition and go home.  He very patiently and calmly told me if I truly wanted to just leave it in the trailer I could, but he told me we also had forty-five minutes until the competition began, spare parts and extra glue if we wanted to try to fix it.  In my mind I was thinking it would be impossible to fix in such a short time.  I would not even know where to begin.  I was just about to give up when my friends egged me on to at least try to fix it, and if we could not, then we could put it away and give up.  So we found a hidden empty corner of the building and went to work.  We had three guys going full speed ahead with hot glue guns, putting track back where it went, putting the elevator back up, and trying our best to get it back to our original creation.  We did have to cut out one area of the track because it was too badly damaged, but we just redirected the track before it and made it work.  In about forty-five minutes exactly we had a working track.  We gave it a test run and it got stuck in one spot.  We did our best to fine-tune that one spot and then carried it into the competition area.  Now we had free time to walk around and check out everyone else’s roller coasters.  There were some pretty fancy, sophisticated coasters.  One was built entirely out of all matching wood square dowel.  It looked so nice.  There were several others that looked like they would simply smoke our rickety little track.  However, we watched everyone else run their coasters in front of the panel of judges.  Since we were the last ones to check ours in, we were the last one to run ours in front of the judges.  As the judges walked up and started looking at the track, I welcomed them, introduced my team, and explained to them the catastrophe we had just been through.  They were impressed we had been able to rebuild it in that short of time.  Then I had to explain each trick, the physics behind it, and why I chose to include it as was a part of the competition since it was for physics classes.  I said a silent prayer that it would work.  Since we were the last group, every other group had left their already judged coasters and crowded around ours to watch.  They had also heard my speech about the day we had already had.  I pulled the ball out of the corn and put it on the track to begin the ride.  It made it about a third of the way through the track before an elevator did not trip and it stopped right there.  That was one strike.  All three of us reset all the tricks that had been tripped correctly and got ready for run two.  This time it made it about two-thirds of the way through to the spot where it had been getting stuck in our trial runs.  We reset everything again, and had one final chance.  Now everyone was as close as they could get watching and actually cheering us on even though we were their competition.  We started the third run and it ran perfectly all the way through up until that same spot that it failed the second time.  I tried to make that as dramatic as possible.  So we were officially out of the competition now since we had struck out three times.  However, the judges asked us to just push the ball by hand so they could see the rest of the track.  With one simple tap it ran the rest of the way without any problems.  The judges told me they wished it had ran all the way through and complimented me on building a fine roller coaster.  They left to go make their final decisions on the winners.  While they were doing that, many of the other students from the other teams talked to my two friends and me about our roller coaster.  We got several compliments and everybody told us they thought our roller coaster was pretty cool and our tricks were very impressive.   The one trick that everyone was most impressed with was a bridge I had built.  I used the green plastic-coated-wire clothes-line.  I used two pieces of it that were the same length and bent them to the same arch.  Then I attached pieces of track to both sides of the bridge.  So the ball would roll down the track, hit the two pieces of wire like train tracks and roll up over the arch and then back on to the next piece of track.  I think everyone made mention to this bridge, and said they never even thought of doing something like that.  So even though I did not win, I did impress the judges and other students and had entered a respected roller coaster.  I also won the theme contest.  I do not know if the judges felt sorry for me and just gave it to me, or if they actually liked the painted logo, tractors, and t-shirts.  Either way it was a small victory but still felt pretty good.  So the day turned out alright, and I was still pretty proud of our rickety roller coaster that tried its best. 

My reason for telling you this long story, other than it’s just a fun story to tell is because I think this is a good example of the Christian life.  We try so hard to live faithful lives, and go through times where we feel like we actually are being good Christians, living rightly, and doing what we are supposed to do.   Then just when we are going through good times, bad things happen.  Maybe a loved one dies, you get in a car wreck, or even just something stresses you out to the point you chew out an innocent bystander.  It does not matter what it is, bad things do happen in this sinful world.  You open that trailer door and find something you were not ready for, and your first thought is to just give up.  It seems like your whole world is hopeless.  You feel helpless and lost.  You question God and start asking why.  You ask how a loving God could let this happen and you just want to give up on this cruel God.  Just like I wanted to shut those trailer doors and give up, you lose certainty in your faith. 

However, hopefully you have friends like mine standing there beside you who encourage you to keep going.  They push you to at least try and give it a little effort.  Hopefully when disaster hits you, you have good Christian friends who are there to pray with you, read Scripture with you, and encourage your faith.  This is part of being united by the body of Christ.  Not only are we never alone because God is with us, but we are also never alone because we have Christian brothers and sisters walking beside us and with us through this sinful world.  God has given us those relationships to strengthen each other, and encourage each other to always remain true to our faith.  Then as you push forward, with the help of God, you begin to realize maybe it was not as bad as it seemed.  Maybe it can still work out for a good day in the end.  I believe there are times when we start focusing on ourselves so much, our own efforts, that we forget God is in control and He is the one we need to keep our focus on.  I think it is OK to say God uses these bad things that happen to us to remind us we are humble creatures who are dependent on our Creator.  We need Him, and if we forget that we are in trouble.  We are dependent of His grace and mercy because we are sinful creatures who can do nothing on our own.  We need Him to sustain us, we need His Son to save us, and we need His Spirit to refresh us.  He wants to remind us that He is in control and while we should try to live a good faithful life, it is still our focus on Him that allows us to do so.  However, just as I still found victory in that day, because of good friends who pushed me on, God will put faithful people in your life to encourage your faith and bring you back to keeping your focus on God which is our only victory.  Now I am not saying if you keep your focus on Jesus, bad things will not happen to you.  I am simply saying that when bad things do happen to you, which is a pretty sure bet in this sinful world, let it bring you back to Christ and strengthen your faith, rather than letting it bring you down.  Then you will also win the best theme award, because Jesus is always the best theme, no matter how much I like John Deere.  I know I went from folding laundry to making Christ the victorious theme of our salvation, but hey that is the crazy kind of trails my mind takes me on.  All Praise Him who is our victorious theme of salvation, and loving God who is in control through all life’s experiences. 

Dear Heavenly Father,

In this sinful life, we do have bad things that happen to us.  We do not know why, but we do know our thoughts are not Your thoughts, and our ways are not Your ways.  We also know You are always in control.  You were in control when you sent You Son to be our Savior.  You were in control as You gave us Your Spirit in our baptism, and You are still in control as You hear our prayers.  Please keep us strong in our faith and let Jesus always be our focus, since He truly is our victorious Redeemer.  In His most Holy name we pray. Amen.  


Here is a picture of my John Deere Ball-Bearing Roller Coaster!