Baseball Family

My wife, Rochelle, hates the baseball postseason! Not because she loses her husband to late-night, extra-inning games but because she loses herself. It seems that in recent years the baseball playoffs have had heart-pounding, heart-breaking drama.

The much belied slow pace of the regular season becomes palpable moments of pregnant expectation in the playoffs. Each moment hangs like a curveball without enough zip. Cameras pan the pained faces of the crowd as pitch after pitch carries the blessing or the curse of winning or losing. It's agonizing. It's wonderful.

You can't do that in football...it's too fast. It won't happen in basketball...the shot clock is ticking. Don't expect it in golf...it's too quite. Forget soccer...I think we already have!

Only baseball has that magic drama of team against team, and one-on-one.

Rochelle is drawn in, like a moth to a flame to the tense drama only baseball can provide. She sits and watches, rises and falls with every late inning pitch--hoping to death that the Yankees will lose. They hardly ever do.

It is in those moments that I am most aware of family unity. I grew up in a baseball family. I'm an Atlanta Braves fan because my mom was. Rochelle grew up in a football family. Rochelle is a Dallas Cowboy's fan because her dad was. Parents shape us in more ways than we know. Adults pass along their love for sports and sports teams as easily as they pass the bread around the kitchen table.

Working with parents in a church setting, I'm often approached about how to pass down the faith from one generation to the next. We all want to know the magic formula for faithful children. I'm not sure if there is one. There are a thousand theories and none of them are fool-proof. But I think the answer may be more simple that I ever realized: love the thing you love and let your children know you love it!

That's what we do with sports. We might be on to something.

Hungry? Why Wait?

G.K. Chesterton once said, "Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God." It seems that all of us seek transcendence through tangible means. It's people, or possessions, or power. But we never find the taste that will satisfy our hunger. We are people of indulgence because we are seekers at heart. We want to find the one thing that will bring us wholeness.

Recently I have been reading through the Sermon on the Mount and something has jumped off the page. Jesus says, "blessed (a word meaning 'happy') are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness."

Most of us spend our time chasing phantom dreams of power and influence, far fewer of us hunger for righteousness. I wonder if we would find the scratch that would finally cure the itch if we took Jesus seriously?

It's more than apparent that pursuing the other lovers of life will not and cannot make us happy: a drinker keeps drinking, a eater keeps eating, the greedy never stop cheating and the unfaithful spouse keep being unfaithful. Our endless courtship with undesirable lovers often leaves us believing that the desirous one would not want us. Nothing could be farther from the truth. God pursues us with a relentless, ferocious longing to win our hearts.

It seems that if we were at all astute, we would chose the God who has already chosen us. As Oswald Chambers has written, "There is only One Being who can satisfy the last aching abyss of the human heart, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ."