Inochinoki.cfm

================================================= ============ AN OLYMPIAN FINDS THE GOLDEN DREAM (Draft for submission to international edition of Olympians who found their Saviour) The following is the true account of how the certainty of Eternity became a reality to me, Michael Sichel, three weeks before competing for Australia in the Rome Olympic Games. It is written to encourage you, dear reader, towards also finding what is rightfully yours ?because of the grace and love of God . + + + +++ +++ The stark contrast that can take place in the life of a person who is changed by the Gospel is, for me, one of the most potent and profound of arguments for the reality of the Life beyond this life. Therefore, I would like to emphasise how much my sport meant to me before my change of heart took place in 1960 ?three weeks before flying out from Australia to compete in the Rome Olympic Games. It was then that I was led away from sport to my life’s work as a health professional. Of course not every sports person whose eyes are ‘opened?to the reality of the meaning of this life and the certainty of the next are led out of sport. God’s ways for each of us are varied, unique, marvellous and sometimes quite different to what we expect! I represented Australia in the 1956 and 1960 Olympic Games, as a fencer. Also, the Commonwealth Games in Cardiff, 1958 and the World Championships in Philadelphia, 1958. I had learned the sport as a merchant navy cadet officer at Pangbourne Nautical College in Berkshire, England. Fencing or sword fighting was the natural development of training in the martial disciplines so necessary to soldiers and cavalrymen right up to and including the First World War, where cavalry skirmishes took place with lance and sword. Fencing practice is done with three types of sword ?the foil, epee and sabre. The major difference between the three weapons is the target area, which also means a different technique. For instance, sabre fencing was developed from the cavalry where the target is from the waist to the top of the head (as seen from horseback ) and includes cutting edges as well as point, while foil is training for infantry combat where vital organs must be the aim with a sharp pointed rapier and the target is the trunk of the body. Epee, the heaviest of the swords ?weighing approx. 17 ounces is the modern dueling weapon where “first blood anywhere?is the aim and all parts of the body are the target. Blood-thirsty as this may sound modern fencing is very safe and 800 newton jackets and fencing breeches are worn plus an underarm, underjacket kevlar plastron to cover the vulnerable axellae (underarm) area with of course a mask made to F.I.E. standards (Federation Internationale Escrime). The bouts are judged by electrical equipment and fenced on a 14 meter metal mesh and earthed strip. The best nations at the sport include Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Hungary, Russia, China, USA and England. In Australia today more schools have fencing as an option than ever before as parents become alarmed at football injuries and see with favour the co-ordination, speed, balance and discipline needed for fencing.. In Sydney some 50 schools compete annually with a full fencing calendar, while Universities have always been a source of Olympic class fencers. As a schoolboy of 15 I had reached the semi- finals of the British Public Schools Fencing Championships in London (1950) from a field of 500 fencers. Next year I came sixth in England in the National Open “B?grade Titles (where I beat my ex-Navy champion coach Jack Finch). Then we emigrated to Australia. To represent Australia in any sport is a wonderful privilege. It means a lot of hard work and the winning of State and National Titles. By 1960 I had won the Australian Championship in Epee ?the weapon used in the pentathlon where the whole body is the target and had been Queensland State Champion in epee, sabre and foil, and was usually in one of the top three places in other National and State events. Fencing is a very aerobic sport, and requires a high degree of fitness, absolute concentration, speed , perfect timing and balance, and the cunning of a chess champion on the run. It is all thoroughly enjoyable and for me the best of the many sports I have played. In Melbourne I reached the semi-finals, having won my first round of eight competitors, and beat the Italian Edoardo Mangiarrotti who later that week won gold in the Team foil event. (He won silver in both Helsinki (1952) and Rome ? among the 13 international medals in his career). This was my very first international event and at the time I felt some satisfaction at being, for that great event, among the top 16 in the world. But was unhappy with myself for not reaching the finals! Later I realised that I did well to beat Europeans who often fenced an international event every second week or so, while we Australians seldom had the chance for even one international a year in those times! (Although in the 1950’s a group of some four or five dedicated fencers sailed to Europe to spend several years in London and Paris training under European coaches. Two of these became Maitre d? Armes ?(Master of Arms), and brought their skills back to Australia. One of these, Michael O’Brien, became Scottish coach. He then moved to Australia and coached myself and many of Australia’s most successful fencers. Among these was Greg Benko who won the World Junior (under 17) Championship and went on to become the first Australian fencer in an Olympic Games final in Montreal (1976), where he came sixth. The other Maitre d’Armes, John Feathers became the first Australian to reach the finals of the World Championships (Rome 1954). In Rome 1960 , many of us in the Australian team were beset by illness. On the way to Rome one of the two Boeing 707’s chartered for the 188 Australian Olympians lost an exhaust ring from its starboard engine and had to land in Bahrain, on the Horn of Africa. This plane carried the fencers and also the swimmers and others. We were taken into the city in buses and I remember seeing with interest the Arabs in their burnooses riding the sandy roads on donkeys which they beat vigorously with sticks to make them trot faster. But it was stifling hot and we drank thirstily of all we could. This and the food we ate became the suspected culprit for an outbreak of gastro and fever among us when we got to Rome. Jon Henricks, the swimmer defending his Melbourne Games 100 metre Gold medal title, was one of the victims (I had marched into the Melbourne Opening Ceremony right behind him ?and every time he took his hat off to wave to the crowd a great roar broke out as his blond crew cut was well-known!). Now, like him, I was one of the victims of the gastro outbreak. Because of this I did not advance from the first round but did manage to beat the fencing legend Christian D’Oriola of France, who had won the gold medal in Helsinki and two gold in Melbourne at the 1956 Games. We were four all (of five hits) and the last hit came during a close body –to- body encounter when I brought my sword clear around behind me and hit him with my arm curled totally behind my back. I heard him cry out, “Impossible!? - as the electronic scoring light flashed on. In Cardiff at the Commonwealth Games in 1958 I won two silver plus coming fourth in the Commonwealth in the individual sabre. The individual sabre was a close fought fight and I could have won gold, silver or bronze. I had won every bout in the final until I met with the last three ?the English team members. The first was their team captain and we faced up with the knowledge that we, the last four, fought for one of three medals! In fencing you fight for the best of five hits. I went well and landed four on him, but he came back to bring it four all. Usually this does not phase me, and in Australia I had often won a close contest like this, always by being the attacker. As I saw my opportunity and flew at him with a fleche attack (a flying movement where your feet leave the ground) he parried while I was still in mid-air, cut at my wrist and hit me. However, I am ashamed now to say that I felt so annoyed at not winning a medal I went out during the medal ceremony that evening and souvenired the intriguing Welsh flag with its bright red dragon on green and white background, plus the Union Jack (just giving them an earlier than usual flag lowering ceremony!). In Philadelphia I advanced to the quarter- finals beating Giancario Benjamini of Italy in one of the semi-final bouts of eight competitors. He later that day became the World Champion for 1958 (he had won silver in Melbourne ?6). For a brief moment I had reached to be among the top 32 in the world. The events that changed my life began to occur six months before flying to the Rome Olympics in the fencing squad in 1960. That year I was trained by Horry Arnell, an athletics coach who had himself raced against Hubert Oppermann (the famous cyclist and politician) and had run in the Stawell Gift. He had been President of the Victorian Footrunners Association and had trained over a 1000 athletes. To reach top fitness Horry eventually had me running 10 miles a night for many weeks, five times a week. Then interval speed work and so on. This made me very fit but also very ‘edgy?and I would quite often lose my temper. As I then worked as a journalist on a newspaper I began to surprise my colleagues; at first I was rather ‘macho? about this. But as time went by I slowly became aware of a conscience pricking my reality. “This is not good, I am hurting people? I thought. At the same time, I felt a need - a deep unknown need for something and began to attend various churches. But I was not satisfied. I did believe, shallowly, that there was a God, and had been raised in boarding schools with chapels and worship (where I enjoyed the peace and spiritual thoughts). However, I was being led, I now know, into a deeper knowledge of this wonderful Person. At that time God led me to meet an actively Christian family. It came about through my newspaper running an annual Miss Bikini Contest. My favourite job was rounding up some of the contestants! One of these, Jean Clark, was the beautiful daughter of this family (she won that year !). They were poor people, but ‘rich in faith? They invited me home for meals and we became friends. The father, a dour Scot, had been a champion quarter- miler and soccer player. The mother sang beautifully and her hymns reached deep into my psyche and I began to see a different world beyond this world. One Friday, three weeks before flying to Rome, they had arranged a Bible study for me in the evening. That very memorable Friday all my Olympic gear had arrived in the post. Blazer, trousers, hat, track-suit, tie, air-tickets - everything ! I came for the study that Friday evening in this Olympic gear, having just demonstrated a fencing bout at a local hotel to raise money with a fellow fencer who had to pay for his own way to Rome. Despite all this excitement the man who spoke with me and showed me through Romans chapters 5 & 6 in the New Testament, kept determinedly on with his task. He was a successful farmer from the Tweed Valley by name of John Brinsmead, brother of the well- known farmer-theologian and preacher Robert Brinsmead (who was later invited by the Germans to preach at the 500th anniversary of the great Reformer Martin Luther). Suddenly, while he was reading how Christ had died and rose again for us, and how we are included in that death and resurrection - my eyes were opened and my heart was ‘strangely warmed? I KNEW that this was true - that Heaven is a reality! that God had come to share His eternal life with ME and I was His. My heart was filled with a peace I had never known and my gratitude showed itself in tears of joy and thanksgiving. I have since talked with many who have had the same “vision?or mind opening. Who can argue against this? There is no psychological reason, no aberrance of an unstable mind here. Here was a healthy, very happy and stable young athlete about to enter the greatest competition in his sport or any other, suddenly enlightened to another and more permanent reality. The reality of the life to come. Many times since I have had that assurance repeated to my heart (usually in less powerful fashion), in many different ways ?but especially at the communion service (the Lord’s Supper). Many times , too, I have needed that assurance. We are indeed born in rebellion against God and are a seriously damaged race. Not least of this condition is the self-deceit of the human heart, which fails to see its innate selfishness and all that goes with that fractured attitude to life. Like death and taxes ? we share our nature together whether we like it or not! Thank God, then dear reader, for His Grace to us ?His knowledge of us being so complete - yet, still He loves us! In one sense it is not God we must fear but ourselves and others . At breakfast this morning my wife and I watched a beautiful but nervous King parrot feeding on the seed we place on the verandah daily. He seemed to view us, his benefactors, with some alarm ?prompting Greta to say: “There is no need for you to worry about us, Mr Parrot!? “And that? I said to her, “neatly sums up God’s message to us humans!? The Christian’s life, I have found, is a battle - but in the midst of a wonderful Peace that nobody can take away. According to the greatest Teacher this world has ever known this is because “where your treasure is, there your heart is also??the future eternal life (which we begin to experience when we accept the invitation gift of faith) is more lastingly real than this present passing world ! After this conversion experience, of equal amazement to me was the fact that suddenly I no longer wished to compete in Rome! My great desire and goal faded that evening ? replaced by a deep thirst for knowledge of this gospel and its Wonderful Author. Looking back I believe that this astonishing shift in goals was given me as a place of certainty to look back on when in dire straits. In any case, this has been so and in the times of darkness and trials I have been through it has helped me immensely to remember that evening. Truly, the Gospel works miracles in peoples lives, is able to break the chains of sin and sorrow, brings a genuine hope and puts on ?a new pair of glasses?with which we see the world and ourselves in reality (Irenaeus, the famous 2nd century Bishop of Lyons, called it “seeing the world with grace healed eyes? . Because my friends were Seventh Day Adventists (although among a group who were breaking away from legalism ?that is, the dependence on obedience for favour with God) they emphasized the Ten Commandments and the fourth commandment regarding the seventh day Sabbath. I became deeply convicted that I should not compete on a Saturday (I have since studied this through and no longer hold to that). But now I was faced with a double-dilemma! I did not even want to compete and I would not compete on the Sabbath. I therefore wrote to my Team Captain Ivan Lund ( who carried the Australian flag at the Tokyo Olympics - his fourth Olympics). Meanwhile my friends urged me to compete, saying my country had selected me and needed me (I was second seed to Lund). Ivan phoned me and admonished me and said much the same, so I acceded to the requests. Then I began to pray earnestly to God to break an arm or a leg as I did not want to go! Thus does a novice begin his career! God took no notice at all! However, I had also said in my letter I would not compete on Saturday and unfortunately I was due to fence as part of the sabre team in the last Saturday of the Games. I did not hear anymore until we arrived in Rome ?although I sat next to Ivan on the plane over. Once in Rome I was hauled before the General Manager Syd Grange and my Fencing Section Manager Andy Zsakall and grilled by them for an hour while I sat facing the bright Italian sunshine pouring on my face from the window behind them. I stood my ground saying “I believe that I should obey God first? Next day the Russians, then home of atheism, approached the Italian Olympic Committee Event Organisers and, for their own purposes, requested the Sabre Teams be changed from Saturday to Friday. This was granted. "Wow?I thought, “what a God I serve? Most would say it was coincidence, I did’nt (and still don’t). On coming back from the Games I found another challenge. My father was becoming further addicted to alcohol and smoking his lungs out. He was not a happy man. God placed on my heart a deep, deep burden for his soul. I am an only child and my mother had left my father when I was 1.5 years old. So we only had each other as a family. I then learned a lesson of how much we rely on Grace . Grace, meaning undeserved and above all Freely offered - favour and acceptance and Love beyond our comprehension. While praying for my father I would find myself in tears and making shattering emotional appeals for his conversion, for Dad to know God. One day while driving down a mountain behind Southport, Queensland where we lived at Mainbeach, such a deep burden for him came upon me that I had to stop the car and kneel on the grass verge of the road ?where I prayed for him with my face to the ground. That night my father had a vivid dream which he described to me the next morning. Now my father was a talented artist and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Artists (FRSA). His sister was a Royal Academician and the archivist for the Royal Insitute of Oil Painters in England ?they were a talented pair. But Dad never spoke about dreams, or about anything personal at all. He was the typical conservative Englishman, yet I could see he was strongly and obviously moved by the dream.That day he began to paint the dream in oils. As the painting took shape I could see it showed himself with myself leading him by the hand on a narrow bridge that spanned a fiery abyss; in the distance, on the horizon was a white cloud with the fiery red reflected in it and in the centre the Cross of Christ. Amazingly, this picture was a very close copy of a coloured painting with almost the same scene (bar ourselves) of the Second Coming of Christ in a book I had been reading. My father had never seen this book. But now I showed it to him and talked with him as best I could about his dream. For many weeks he was very thoughtful and I do not know what effect it had on his heart, for he would not talk anymore about it. This is still my sorrow, as he died in 1978. However, I did manage to stop him smoking ? although too late as emphysema later developed in his airways. The lesson for me has been the importance of obtaining the help of trained Christian counselors (preferably those who have been through severe personal battles themselves) to help in the work of saving the life of those who have no hope . It is also a lesson in how personally God will intervene in our lives if we ask Him. For the human parent this maybe easy to understand ?how much we long to help and guide our children, how we long to hear them speak to us and tell us their joys, triumphs and share their sorrows! So it is with our heavenly Father, He longs to have you come to Him in prayer and bring your burdens, joys and sorrows. That is what I have found to be true. Make it a daily necessity, like eating and drinking ?start the day that way. God is beyond our comprehension, but Jesus made Him understandable in human terms. He never failed to hear a cry for help ?even though it may not appear that way. Always a certain Peace comes that enables the bearing of whatever load it is that cannot be taken away. Nobody, and nothing, can take that from us! Hear the hymns or “spirituals?sung by the early American negro slaves ?whose lives were often unbearable. They “knew God?who loves the poor, the outcasts, the despised of this world. He was their reward. Let Him be yours. Footnote: A surprising percentage of the world’s leading sportsmen and women are active believing Christians. You will not see this in the popular media as the Gospel is not a popular media event ! In fact, a surprisingly large percentage of the media are atheists or at best - agnostic, as in fact are many of those who orchestrate public thinking (educationalists, politicians, judges, film-makers). This is why so much of what we read and see is blatant social engineering designed to break down society as we have known it and introduce in its place what are actually left wing socialist anti- God principles. So we see the attempted break-up of the family, the introduction of harmful and health destroying alternatives, the teaching that evolution ?although so-far unproven, is a scientific reality (although more and more secular scientists are questioning its currently taught validity, especially in light of the last decades advances in the science of molecular cell physiology which shows such interdependant complexity as to make evolution impossible). Other New Age “ideas?that are destroying our society include the teaching that there is no right or wrong, that humans are not rebellious and selfish by nature (‘sinful?in Christian parlance) and following that, therefore it is wrong to discipline children. Furthermore, following the premise of no sinful nature ?man is perfectable by ‘evolution?(which recent and ancient history emphatically contradicts); that if something ‘feels right ?do it?? therefore there is no need for self- discipline. Whereas, children feel insecure without boundaries, all of us are unsure with no laws or discipline. This in turn leads to hedonism to stifle the meaningless of life. This nihilism (no meaning) is also the fruit of evolution ?for if we live and die with no hope as mere chances of fortune, why not do as we wish? Part of the blame for the rise of atheism among the so-called thinking people of nations must be placed on the institutions of the Christian church itself which have for long been more interested in their own self-perpetuation than the Good News of God’s love for all humanity. Doctrines such as eternal suffering in hell fire, of the celibacy of the clergy, of no future marriage for a marriage partner ? although the innocent party of a divorce (which idea was early forced on my daughter by some in her church (to my anger ?but thankfully now happily married), of no abortion even though the foetus is a rape pregnancy, of no euthanasia even of those in extreme pain, of extreme views in many areas ?they are not acceptable to any person who thinks them through neither are they in harmony with a God of Love and Mercy. Therefore, many are initially turned away from hearing the only message the church should teach ?the Gospel. Another stumbling block that causes a turning away by superficial thought is the question: “How can a loving God allow innocent children to suffer and die? Or the suffering of raped nations like Kosovo, East Timor, etc etc. ? But mankind has been given a dangerous gift ? the gift of Freedom. You don’t have to read this ?many will choose not to. But you can choose to kill or not to kill, to torture or heal. Once again, we must be reminded that there are powerful supernatural forces operating around us ?the legions of evil spirits that lie behind the witchcraft, the spiritualistic worshippers, the possessed people. These fallen beings can influence us and our leaders, and the leaders are their target. Adolf Hitler, for example regularily consulted with a medium (that is why he invaded Russia instead of Britain ?and so lost the war, but with maximum bloodshed and misery). The only hope for mankind ?and you dear reader, is to hide in the shadow of the Almighty God our Father Who revealed Himself to us in Christ, the Creator and Saviour of this now sorrowful world. In turning to Him you will find true Freedom and the answer to the meaning and purpose of life. For the good news of free acceptance and boundless love offered to every human being (as shown so dramatically in the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth) makes the Christian message unique among the ‘religions? of the world. ‘Religion?is man’s way of seeking God ?the Gospel is God’s Way of seeking man. He has found you in His Son the substitute Man, the only Perfect Man ?you are complete in Him ?accept that Good News ( wonderful News ! ) and you are His forever, for Eternity! Repent, be sorry of your unbelief and accept Him Who longs for you.