God continually blows me away by how He can provide beyond what we ask or even imagine. As a small school, we don't have a gymnasium of our own, so we have always had to rent one for our sports teams to practice in. And it has always been a struggle to find available, affordable space for practices. For years, the boys and girls teams have practiced in the same gym at the same time for only a few days each week, sharing all the equipment. Obviously this is not even close to an ideal situation, but there was nothing anyone could do about it. Until this year...
As the athletic director, one of my biggest priorities was to find alternatives to this one gym. I tried several different options, but each was met with rejection. But after quite a bit of prayer, God opened a door for ICS in a big way. Our first breakthrough came in the form of a Korean elementary school. Normally schools don't rent their gyms out, especially to foreigners, but this particular school had a principal who really wanted to build relationships with foreigners in order to share with them a part of Korean culture that he was very passionate about (Korean Turtle-boat making). And because of this, he was eager to rent his gym to us, and the cost of the gym was.......$10/hr!
You can't begin to imagine my elation when he told me this. $10/hr for a gym is absolutely unheard of in Korea! And the only stipulation he put on this was that he be allowed to come to our school and teach us how to make Korean turtle-boats (which look totally awesome and I'd want to learn how to make anyway). You can bet I left that meeting praising God.
A few days later, I went and visited a place called the Paengsong. This was a brand new facility and had a really nice gym, but we hadn't been able to use it for volleyball because there were badminton nets set up for the entire length of the gym. Now the natural solution of "take the nets down for our practice and set them up when we're finished" may have come to your mind, as it did mine, but we had been told that they weren't willing to do that because the nets took a lot of effort to set up. So as I walked into the office of the Paengsong to speak with the man in charge of the gym, I wasn't feeling too hopeful.
When I asked him if they would take down the nets for our practice, he answered, "No." However, a few minutes later, that "no" changed to a "let me see." A few days later, we got a phone call, and the "let me see" had turned into a "yes." So today I went there again to fill out the paper work, and not only are we getting the gym for practices, we also can use it for our home games in November, but it's FREE. No rental fee, no electricity fee, absolutely FREE!
So to summarize: Two gyms, with exactly the availability that we wanted, and an absolutely unbeatable price. GOD IS GOOD!
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