Play Ball!

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Go Cubs! This is our year... right?

Since it's opening day of the 2011 Major League Baseball season, I thought I'd write with a major league theme.

Baseball is unlike Basketball, Football, and Hockey, in that the game of baseball is really about surviving the grueling schedule.

There are 162 games in the regular season. 81 at home and 81 away. 162 games before playing a single playoff game.  Compare that to 16 in the NFL, 82 in NBA & NHL regular seasons.

In Baseball you come into a city and play a 3 or 4 game series. When you finish, you immediately move on to a new city and a new series of games.  For this reason it's said that a good baseball player has a short memory. You always have to move on to the next pitch, next inning, next game, next city...

I think doing ministry is a lot like the Baseball schedule.  We have to keep moving forward, thinking forward. We need short memories. Not that we don't remember our successes and failures but that those successes and failures don't cloud the current moment. Once the moment is past, it's on to the next moment.

Have you ever felt bad about your ministry "performance."  Have you ever lingered on the moment and it caused your next ministry moment to also suffer? Double ouch.

It is said the hardest thing to do in all sports is to hit a major league fastball. You have such limited reaction time and such a small surface area of connection between bat and ball.  About the time you've decided the pitch is either in or out of the strike zone you hear the slap of the catchers mitt. It is completely split second.

Swing batter

The truly great hitters, people like Ted Williams and Tony Gwynn, speak in almost cosmic terms about being able to see the seams of the baseball mid pitch. They say they could actually tell what kind of pitch it would be from the movement of the seams! In that split second moment they would know what to do...

Working in the Church, we need to be able to see the situation and know what to do. There are times where as I am leading my congregation in worship, God allows me to see the "Seams."  God gives us insight as we lead. The gifts of the Spirit (1 Cor 12:8-10) help us in this area. Discernment, Knowledge, and Wisdom can give us insight in a split second... then we know what to do...

Those moments are great! But they are just moments in a looong season, and sometimes we hardly have the time to truly celebrate that success before moving on to the next pitch, next inning, next game, next city...

My prayer for you is NOT that you will have success in every moment... Let's face it... Jesus didn't even have that! My prayer for you is that you will have the determination & strength to walk into the next moment and play ball!