Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: New Patch/New Wine - Old Garment/Bottle (Matthew 9:16-17, Mark 2:21-22, Luke 5:36-39} (01/04/24)
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TITLE: Sneezin' Season | Previous Challenge Entry
By Jack Taylor
01/07/24 -
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I wanted to show my friend Njorge that the local courses were as good as any in his native Kenya. I’d let him take the first tee and he had driven his ball a mere 250 yards to the right edge of the fairway. I planted my wooden tee, placed the ball, and took my practice swings. I smiled at him, nodded, and stepped up for the show. That’s when the twitch in my nose began. I rubbed at the irritant with the back of my golf glove and then took another swing.
“It’s okay, my friend,” he said. “Chai will be waiting for us no matter when we get back to the clubhouse.”
The battle was on and I gathered the whine. “I think they’ve just cut the grass and my lungs are a little sensitive right now,” I said. “I’ve got an allergy to dust, grass, and pollen.”
“Should I be expecting a slice then?” he mocked.
I overcorrected for the slice and swung. A half-second after the achoo rocked my body. A half-second before the ball flew a hundred yards forward and fifty feet into the woods on the left. A half-second before my glasses flipped off my nose and onto the muddy ground. “Shortcut to the pin,” I announced, rubbing my nose again.
“Might be your breakfast,” Njorge said. “Could be a snatiation reflex.” He checked the scorecard. “I think the dogleg goes the other way.”
I wiped my glasses clean as my whine bubbled up for another round. “I think the breeze tickled my trigeminal nerve and irritated my nose at the wrong time.”
Njorge halted in the middle of the fairway as I bush barged. “Guess you’re up,” he called. “Tell me if you need me to call search and rescue for that ball. I think you avoided the lake.”
It took three swings for me to get out of there to the green, but I’d kept my sneezes under control during my swing. Fortunately, my putting was good and his wasn’t. I was only two strokes off the pace at the second hole. “Let’s see if you can straighten up your swing this time,” I said. He did.
As I stepped up for more practice swings, still sneezing, Njoroge glanced toward the sun and took on his teaching role. “Did you know that the ACHOO syndrome stands for an ‘autosomal dominant compelling helio-ophthalmic outburst?’ You may be sensitive to light. Bright lights can do that.”
I grit my dentures and swung, this time hardly off the fairway to the left. “I think that syndrome has to be genetic in some way,” I said.
He drove his ball to the edge of the green. “Did anyone else in your family sneeze like this?”
I backed toward my ball, taking time to blow my nose and clear it. “We used to go family camping every summer when I was younger and I remember my father used to sneeze a lot. He stopped going outside and seemed to be fine after that.”
He smirked. “So, you packaged his old whine in your new bod?”
I landed fifteen feet from the pin without a sneeze. “If you think of my lungs as if they were wineskins, I guess this puts a new twist on what Jesus said. I put the old whine into the new whineskins and they burst with a sneeze.”
He laughed as he stroked and put the ball ten feet to the right. We were even after two.
At the fifth green Njoroge stopped me. “I’ve always wondered why you missionaries came out to my country. You had new teaching and it didn’t fit into our old traditions. It seemed to cause more trouble than it was worth in our family.” He chipped onto the green. “I used to hear this teaching and think of the Maasai who put their fermented milk into a dried calabash gourd with charcoal so they could live on it during their long journeys. It didn’t make sense to me.”
“But when you understood that Jesus was talking about wine into goatskin bags, it made all the difference.”
“Yes! I understood, then I believed. Now, you can putt.”
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