Mr. Beckeman's Blog

This has become a GREAT annual event for our community!  Coach Sikkenga and his varsity hockey team will host a public skate on Wednesday, December 21st at 4:15 at Lakeshore Ice Arena.  The cost is $3.00 with skate rental available for an additional $2.00.

The hockey players are a great help to the beginning skaters and are more than willing to offer tips for the more advanced skaters.

If  you haven’t been on skates in a long time, Wednesday, Dec. 21st is the perfect time to lace a pair on!  It’s a guaranteed wonderful time!

I am a Tim Tebow fan! 

If you don’t know who Tim Tebow is, I’ll catch you up to speed in a few sentences.  Tim was a high school All-American at Nease High School in St. Augustine, Florida.  He became a two-time All-American at the University of Florida where he won two national championships and the coveted Heisman Trophy, an annual award given to the best college football player in the country.  He currently plays quarterback for the Denver Broncos in the NFL. 

It seems as though there are numerous people who’ve jumped on the anti-Tebow bus, saying he doesn’t have the talent to be on an NFL roster let alone being tabbed the starting quarterback for the Broncos.  As I write this post, the Tebow-led Broncos are 6-1 with Tim as their starting signal-caller.

If you enjoy reading about publicity stunts, nightclub incidents, dog-fighting hobbies or the soap opera that is Brett Favre, don’t click on an article about Tim Tebow.  If you follow twitter, Tim won’t be “trending” anytime soon.

Tim Tebow is a young man of whom we can all be proud.  He is clean-cut, articulate, humble, gracious in victory, hard-working, and, if that weren’t enough, he’s a humanitarian.  He’s not the kind of humanitarian that gives in the public eye, but a humanitarian who gives quietly in the orphanages of the Philippines.

The football critics, and there are many, say Tebow lacks accuracy, experience and football I.Q.  The offense he’s best suited for will never work in the NFL; he can’t adapt to the professional game.  It seems as though the commentators and other critics who have been given microphones and  a panel of like-minded analysts are waiting for the “other” shoe to drop. 

Jake Plummer, the latest to take pot shots at the embattled Denver quarterback, might have been speaking for the “anti-Tebow nation” when he said in a recent interview on a Phoenix radio station that he would like Tebow more if he would “shut-up” about his faith in Jesus Christ.  It seems that this statement let, the cat, as they say, out of the bag.

Did Plummer say what the commentators dared not to say when the national spotlight was shining brightly on their face in homes across America?  Is their dislike for Tim Tebow more about his faith than his throwing motion?  As a society, do we really want heroes who are truly good? Or, do we want them to fail a drug test or start a bar fight?  Does it make us feel better about ourselves?  Tim Tebow however, doesn’t make us feel better about ourselves.  People like him make us feel a little convicted about the things we say and do.  So we find a reason to dislike him.  Or, when Tebow says that the glory goes to God and the credit for a victory goes to his teammates, coaches and family, we are suspicious.  It would seem that we live in an ever-increasingly jaded culture, we don’t believe that anyone can say such things and really mean them.

I will continue to cheer for Tim Tebow!  I respect the way he plays the game of football and for the stand he makes in the game of life.  His story is played out in his actions and deeds, not tattooed somewhere on his body.