My weapon of choice is...

Swords have always been a symbol of power, courage and skill.

Would you believe in the late ‘70’s, while we lived and worked in North Battleford, Sk. I took up “fencing”. No, this was not the kind of fence to corral domestic animals and such, it was a “very safe” form of sword fighting!

I remember when we were kids, we loved to sword fight. We made clumsy wooden swords and whacked away at one another. We soon learned to wear work gloves as our hands would take a beating very quickly. As time went on we looked for and experimented with more realistic “swords” finding thin rods of different kinds of metal etc. I’m not sure how safe this all was but we managed to play mostly in secret as we knew our father would tell us to quit if he saw us doing it. A lot of times when we had to do the chores ourselves, the fencing activities were way more important than the milking of cows, and the chores for some reason lasted much longer than usual. I’m sure the cows were in severe pain by the time we’d finally get to milking them!

Somehow we all managed to survive with no one getting impaled and with all our eyes intact!

When I joined the “fencing club” it was so exciting to finally really do it, and in the correct way. I learned new French words such as “parry” and “riposte” and felt so exotic. Unlike the swords we used on the farm these had a blunted point with a small rubber on the tip. The only way to score was to touch the opponent with the tip and only on certain parts of the body. The head, arms and legs were out of bounds. Touching with the side of the blade did not count. It was ones “thrusting” techniques that would bring success. Plus, we also wore protective clothing and masks!

I know what you are thinking, how is it that a pacifist Mennonite could pick up  a military training weapon for the sheer joy of attempting to poke someone in a vital area, just for fun?

Hey, it’s an Olympic sport! Who knows where this could have gone!

Maybe I’m not quite the Mennonite you thought I was.

“For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword...discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”

Hebrews 4:12