Crooked Lines Made Straight

In this episode, we look throughout Biblical History and see stories of flawed heroes who made bad choices and as a result, went off God's Plan.  "Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made straight." Isaiah 40:4.  God guides his creation to his desired end (eventually through dramas of evil and human sin).  In our martial art training, we talked about straight palm strikes and straight side kicks with pew squats (in Shiro Drills) for strong stances for kicks.  Discipline and training helps a student to focus their movement, center their target areas, and make consistent their motivation.  Being a follower of Jesus in a secular world is not easy and staying true to our faith takes effort.  While meditating on the scripture using Lectio Divina can help us to understanding and connect the lines, thus helping God make the lines straight again.   

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Hello and welcome to Christian Samurai Podcast. I'm your host, Craig Greka, and I am a kingdom priest and future deacon in the Catholic Church. I'm also a seventh degree deputy grandmaster in the Universal Martial Art as well as other black belts in other martial arts. And we're here today to interweave Catholic Christianity into martial arts training. Now our topic today is crooked lines made straight. Crooked lines made straight. In related history, throughout the Bible there are stories about people who made bad decisions, whether it is Jacob with his four wives or King David's adultery with Bathsheba and then setting it up for her husband to die. God will take these crooked lines and eventually make them straight. Even in the genealogy of Jesus, there are many twists and turns until it comes to his birth. Now our daily scripture today comes to us from Isaiah forty four, declares that every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight. And our catechism reference is Catechism three one four. And even though dramas of evil and human sin, he guides creation to its desired end. And that's exactly our point today for our topic. Now a little personal story. The Bible in a year on the Hallow app done by Father Mike Schmidt is very enlightening, not only for the reading of the Bible in a year, but also to listening to Father Mike Schmidt's commentary and Bible study on it as well. But one of the things was is that I was disturbed by the brokenness in Genesis and beyond. That was until Father Mike Schmidt explained that all of this brokenness is somehow made straight through the will of God. It may not lead to good right away, but through inspired good decisions in future generations, it is made right again. So I thought that was very significant that God kind of weaves this sweater, you know, back and forth you know, through problems, human sin, people making bad choices, and then eventually, you know, he makes it right. That's why a lot of times uh people fall out of faith because they don't trust in God's master plan. Now, in our martial arts training today, um in reference to crooked lines made straight, we first talk about our physical training. Um, one of the techniques that we teach in our Christian martial art, Christian Samurai martial art program, is the palm strike. Now, the palm strike goes from it goes in a straight line from the shoulder to the end of the strike. Okay, so from your shoulder to the end of the strike, as your arms 95% straight, the palm strike goes in a straight line. Okay, and that's how you dish out maximum thrust, maximum push, and of course maximum power. Another martial art technique that does that is the sidekick. Sidekicks are more powerful when they're properly chambered and the shin bone stays in a sh stays kicking in a straight line. A lot of martial arts will do weird stuff like it'll go crooked or flip up, uh, maybe you fall down, but the sidekick works better when it's properly knee-backed and chambered, and then kicking in a straight line rather than a crooked line. So basically a crooked line means straight. When a student first starts to train, their techniques go back and forth, and they're not centered, um, and they're not very productive, and they're not very efficient until they become proficient. I actually uh saw a picture on Facebook the other day. Uh I get a lot of martial arts posts. One of them was uh showing a student like three levels of training, like beginner, intermediate, and like black belt or advanced level, and it showed the same male student, and like at first the punch was kind of like all over the place, and it wasn't in the center, it wasn't in a straight line, and then it showed them you know getting it tighter, you know, towards that goal, and then they of course the advanced student or the black belt student uh would have a perfectly centered balanced punch with full straight extension and properly targeted. Uh so basic, you know, basically as a student trains, soon they become straight and focused. So when they start off, they're kind of wobbling all over the place, and then eventually they become straight and focused. Now, discipline also helps to keep your training consistent because just like techniques can go in straight lines, your training needs to go in a straight line as well. So discipline helps to keep your training consistent even when your motivation goes up and down. And a lot of times this happens for martial artists, their motivation goes up and down as they do their martial arts journey, and discipline keeps them coming back. So if a student has a lot of discipline, that usually means that they will be a good student. And in our experience, it's the less um gifted ones that have good discipline that end up going all the way. Now, uh another physical training for us today, um in our Christian samurai program, we have uh everything is based on like um uh like church, um monastic life, um and and and such like that, um, you know, Catholic Christian life. Um I have a um movement called a pew squat. Okay, so when you go to church and you go to a pew and then you sit down and stand up, sit down and stand up, it's the perfect squat. And we do these in this martial art program to strengthen our legs so that we have kicks that are nice and strong and also strong stances as well. Now, another thing that we do in our um universal martial art program, which is another martial art program I teach, we do a speed drill. Okay, it's a drill that's used to develop anaerobic speed and power. In the Christian samurai program, we have a Shiro drill, named after a young uh Christian samurai uh who led the charge uh for Christianity in his area. He was only 17 years old. So I decided to name the drills after him. So it's called a Shiro drill instead of a speed drill. Very similar though. And what we do in this is we combine strength exercises with martial art movements, like the pew squats we talked about earlier, or maybe another one that I've coined, which is the prayer jacks. So you do uh prayer jacks, so those are kind of fun as well. Now, um for our spiritual training, so in our in our Christian samurai podcast, we talk about um scripture and catechism and um different in different parts of the topic like that. Uh, we're also going to talk about um our martial art training and our spiritual training, and our spiritual training in this has specifically to do with uh our religion. So spiritual training today we have being a follower of Jesus in a secular world is not easy, and staying true to our faith takes effort. Okay. Now, I've gone through a spiritual transformation recently, and it's kind of ironic because when you uh put yourself uh in a more spiritual sense, you start to see how silly some of the things of the secular world are, you know, and the the bad choices that people make. You know, and people think they're being normal too. That's the thing that's that's uh that's hilarious. They think they're being normal and they're not. And it's not easy either, just like I said. Um you know, even with me, like you know, I'm driving and uh people are kind of in my way and I get kind of impatient uh with it. And uh that's me being too involved with the secular world because if I was on God's time, I wouldn't be trying to rush through traffic trying to get somewhere. Sometimes I'm just trying to get, I just don't want to drive anymore. It's kind of weird. But, anyways, uh back to our spiritual training. Uh, you have to do the right thing even when it's unpopular or when nobody else is looking. You know, so you have to do the right thing even when it's unpopular and nobody else is looking. And these are part of the you know good decisions that people make. Also, too, uh, one of the things that you can do is you can meditate on the scripture. And uh we would do this in our spirit in our Christian samurai class too, meditate on the scripture, or do Lexio Divina, which is more than just simply reading the scripture or reading the biblical text, but to internalize the meaning of the passage and to meditate on it. You know? So in martial arts we do a lot of meditation, but what kind of meditation can we do? We don't have to do the meditation that was presented in more of a secular uh or mystical uh China, Japan, or India, wherever the martial art was originated. We can do it the meditation part of it, the mental part of it, we can do using our own Christianity program. Um and then after you do Lexio Divina on the scripture, one thing you can do is you can uh then pray for more understanding. So that uh I do that all the time. So you're using Lexio Divina to meditate on a scripture passage and then you pray to understand it more because the more that you dive in, the more that you find out that you don't know. Um one thing that I do is that I I call it a what of my uh traits or powers, so to speak, whatever. I'm good at connecting dots. So like when I'm driving, if I see a road and then I see the road later from a different location, I always wonder, does that road connect? Like, oh, that's the same name. I wonder if that road connects. Sometimes it does. Okay, so sometimes it does connect. Um like there's a road in Canton, Michigan here where it's called Yoast. It doesn't connect. So um sometimes roads don't connect, uh, but then sometimes they do, and you find a shortcut. Okay, you find a better path. Um the same thing's true with my um spiritual or religious training. One thing I do is I always wonder, I'm like, you know, how does that connect? You know, how does that connect? Um like one thing I mentioned in the last podcast was um, you know, um they're celebrating in a jubilee now with uh Saint Francis of Assisi. So, and I'm not saying this is a dramatic thing, I just can't think of any other example right now. And they say um, you know, it's it's a Jubilee. So I look at it and I'm just like uh it you know, 2026, and I'm like, okay. And then it's eight hundred eight hundred Jubilee, and that means that he died in twelve twenty-six. So I'm like, in twelve twenty-six, wow, that was a long time ago. So sometimes I try to connect the dots whenever I I I see things and I try and see what was going on in twelve twenty-six, you know, and you look at uh history and stuff, and then you try and connect the dots. So sometimes when I what I'm trying to say is is that sometimes when I'm reading scripture or watching a Christian television show, uh like a documentary or something, uh I've been watching one now uh called uh I think it's called Drive Through History, and uh he um took you to all the sites from when Jesus was resurrected in Acts of the Apostles to Um Revelation. So he took you where all like where all the with all the in the Acts of the Apostles, where they went, like where did Peter go, where did Paul go, uh James, John. Um so they were like a little the little little bit of where they went afterwards and where they they spread out. Most of the Acts, if you read Acts of the Apostles, most of it's about Peter and Paul. So if you look at Peter and Paul, then you can kind of see, and they take you to different archaeological sites where they could have lived, and it's kind of cool, you know, because then you start piecing stuff together. And what I'm ultimately saying is that it it uh gives you a curiosity. So when you do a lot of research like this, it gives you a curiosity, and you're like, Man, I wonder this, or I wonder this, or I wonder this. Sometimes, like I said, with the driving, sometimes it connects, and a lot of times it does, but sometimes it does not, and you need to let it go. But sometimes you keep that the back of your mind, maybe it might connect, you'll see. But sometimes I think you have to keep your curiosity up just in case that one of your initial um unconnected points end up ends up being connecting in some way. So it's kind of it's kind of a fun thing. I I think something that I like to do. Okay, so um just to wrap things up a little bit, our uh Saint of the Day is one of my um one of my uh spiritual saints. It's not a great role model, but um he lives a broken life, and I thought it was suitable for the uh crooked lines made straight, is Saint David, King and Prophet. Okay Saint David was a good person. He was a he was a good king at some point, a bad father at some point, a prophet at some point, um made bad decisions, you know, but ultimately he repented. So that's the biggest thing. The biggest thing in life is whether or not you repent for your broken life. You know, you try to make good choices throughout your life, sometimes you get led astray, one sin leads to another, leads to another, but you have to make sure that you repent and make sure that you stop and avoid mere occasions of s of sin from then on. And that's the hard part, living in grace. And this week's fruit of the mystery, fruit of the mystery is patience. And I chose that one because you have to be patient to see those crooked lines made straight. And of course, we have our Christian song line of the day. Okay, so Christian song line of the day is Though I've sung a thousand times, you're perfect and you'll never leave my side. Can I be honest? I just want to know that you still got this when all I'm holding on to is a promise. God, you promise that you'll never leave me. Okay? And that is the song Honest by Liana Crawford. Okay, Honest by Liana Crawford, and it's great because uh I love the song because she asked the question that a lot of people want to ask. When they see all the brokenness in the world, they want to know, God, do you still have this? You know, do you still have this? You know, I'm I'm I'm still by your side, but I'm just wondering, you know, do are you still present? Are you still helping? Are you still trying to make those lines straight? Are you where can we see the good in all this? You know, so we have to be honest. We want to know that you still got this, you know. I love the song. The song's just great. So, anyways, um remember that uh we'll be here each week applying our Christian faith and philosophy into the learning of martial arts through being brave and being warriors of faith to make a better world. I hope that you enjoy the rest of your day and the rest of your week. This is Christian Samurai. Have a great day. Bye-bye.