In case you’re skeptical, let me assure you that falling is, in fact, central to the sport of roller derby. Search video of the world championship roller derby bout — Google even Gotham Girls Roller Derby or the Rose City Rollers — and watch them compete…they all fall. In fact, in a balanced bout between two teams of rivalling skill, the team that wins is rarely the team that falls less often, but the team that scrambles up fastest. At booty camp, Violent Emme assured me. “You’ll never stop falling, that’s why it’s the first thing you learn on the first day you strap on skates. The key is to fall small and get up fast so that you can skate with your team. You’re no good to us on the ground.”

By way of instruction, she threw herself onto the rink, sprawled wide, arms and legs all kinds of akimbo, and she asked me what kinds of problems a big fall might cause.

“Well, someone could roll over your fingers…” I observed (trying so hard to be right…..to be derby).

“RIGHT! When you fall big, you endanger yourself. Broken fingers is just one of the hundreds of ways people get hurt when they fall wide and stay down. Lots of real injuries happen this way.” she agreed. “What else?”

“Ummmm…..” I was stuck on the finger breaking …..

“What about other people? If you fall like this, you become a real danger to your teammates, to everyone else on the track, really. If you fall big, you’ll hurt yourself or someone else, guaranteed. The key, then, is to fall small. When you feel yourself going down, find the floor, tuck your fingers under your palms, reach for the track with your wrist guards and knee pads, the parts made to take impact, and fall small.”

For the next 15 or 20 minutes, I practiced a sequence of falls — one knee falls, two knee falls, four point falls — throwing myself onto the track again and again, flinging myself down face first on the wooden slats of the rink — learning to find my pads. Learning to get up fast, over and over and over again, until I could tuck my fingers, control my arms and legs, and push back up onto my eight strong wheels.

Later, while I worked to untangle my knotted laces and pry out my bulky, amateur mouthguard, I asked, “what happens, though, when you fall during a bout?”

“Well,” Emme had answered, “sometimes you can spot someone in the same colored jersey who will give you a quick hand up. But sometimes you fall so hard that something sprains or breaks. If that happens, if you fall and you really can’t get up, then a ref will blow the whistle, everyone will take a knee, and the medics will come over to fix you up” Almost every bout, someone crashes this way, falls so hard or gets hit just right, and they slam onto the rink, unable to regain their skates. And the ref blows the whistle, and everyone – refs, skaters, volunteers, opponents, coaches, EVERYONE – takes a knee. And when they get up – even if it’s with help – when they skate off the rink – even if it’s hobbling without skates, arms over the shoulders of the medics…..everyone just claps. Claps just because they got up.

I drove home that night in tears.

These derby girls sounded so much like the Kingdom I prayed would come —  they were living out a gospel I’d never heard in church — and it sounded so much more like Jesus to me.

My church lessons about falling down came from people in tidy skirts and incredibly clean pants. They talked about “The Fall of Man,” intimating that sin was out there somewhere — slithering ugly and easy to spot — and we should avoid it. And if we did, if we just stayed away from snakes, we wouldn’t fall….not hard or often, anyway. And if, by some lapse of reason or willful insurrection, we crashed ingloriously, His grace could lift us up, once and for all, per all the hymns. “And after you’ve been lifted from the floor and set back on your skates,” all the lessons suggested, “you’ll get better at this…..and you won’t fall so much anymore…..and eventually, you’ll be able to skate without falling down at all,” they pretended, hiding a hundred bruises under their Sunday best. The Fall of Man was something that happened a long time ago, something that happened once and for all in humanity and once and for all in every Christian life.

But I was the Fall of Man, every single day by 10:00 a.m.. And I felt so lonely and so busted up. And I didn’t know how to find someone in the same color of jersey. And I didn’t know I could flag down an official. And every bone was broken. And every inch of me was bruised.

I might have lived so differently if I’d known that falling would always be part of this game. I wouldn’t have had to cover up all of my cut and swollen places, wouldn’t have had to crawl so far away. I wept, hard, for the sweet girl, all geared up and ambition, so ashamed every time she tripped over her own toe stops. So embarrassed that, more than once, she’d scoot over to the wall and edge her way off the rink, gear down, and leave altogether. I still felt the mocking glares of people, even people on my own team, shaking heads and wagging fingers while I floundered. And when I fell so hard that I couldn’t find my feet again, they just skated right past, rolling over my fingers, whispering in hallways as they flew by, “Did you see how she fell?” or “Did you hear about the crash?” or “Didn’t you hear how hard she hit the ground this time?”

What if church was more like roller derby? What if the Sunday school teachers and junior worship leaders and pastors and preachers told everyone that falling is, and will always be, part of this sport…..that we never get so good at loving that we would play this Kingdom game without falling down. What if we told people, instead, to fall small…..to find their pads….the parts designed to catch them — not to sprawl out, all injury prone, a danger to everyone else on our team…..bemoaning a moment of instability, a clumsy surrender to gravity, or the inability to counterblock an especially strong hit. And what if, when they fell so hard that they couldn’t get up, fell down completely broken, someone would blow a whistle, and everyone, EVERYONE, would just take a knee. What if, whenever and however they managed to find their feet again….even if it meant getting lots of help…..even if it meant they were carried…we all just clapped because they got back up again.

The Diesel Dollz, in their commanding ink and conspicuous metal, in their booty shorts and fishnets, were holding church at a skating rink sanctuary. I was hearing the Kingdom message that my soul hungered for, finding my Creator on the boards of this flat track in a way I had never encountered Him from the pews. I was hooked.