Read the Pitch and Swing

When I was little I learned to play baseball.  One thing I always had a problem with was reading the pitches. There was a science to it that was far beyond my feeble mind; the way the pitcher released the ball, the way the laces were rotating as the ball spun one direction or another, all dictated the difference between a sinker, a slider, a curve ball or a fastball.  You had to learn how to read the pitch and then time your swing, trying to swing through the ball, not at it.

 I was a better fielder than hitter, but I hit the ball a lot harder than my size seemed to allow, so it was always with my “supposed” potential promise that I tried to learn the art of hitting.  I fell in love with football and reading defenses before I ever really got it down, and except for co-ed softball leagues in my later years (slow pitch, of course, lol) I never really picked up a bat again.

In our men’s group the analogy that learning how to be a diligent believer was a lot like being a batter who can’t properly learn how to hit a curve ball recently came up.  If sin is the pitch and our faith is our swing, then why is it so hard to just get this Christianity “thing” down? I mean, as children we learn very quickly to avoid those things which cause us pain. Some of these lessons are very useful (like not putting your hand on a hot stove) and other lessons are self taught and to our own detriment (like giving up on baseball because we can’t get the curveball figured out, which may lead to a life of avoidance of things that challenge us too much).

My logic (emphasis on my) leads me to become frustrated by my faith which is often challenged and often in a state of flux.  Now by that I do not mean that I vacillate between belief and non-belief. I mean that I vacillate between “getting it right” for a brief spurt of time and then “not getting it right” for another.  I simply cannot figure out why God would create in me a desire to be saved, only to see me put that salvation in jeopardy each day. I mean, it seems at times like the baseball coach who watches you struggle for years to hit the curve ball, sees you finally do it one day, then sees you go right back to striking out when facing curve balls.  What is that coach to do? 

I heard varying opinions from the group. A few were depressing (like the idea that you won’t get it right until you die) and others were more inspirational (like the idea that Christ keeps working with us to get it right, that each step toward perfecting our swing cannot come without, well, all the misses).

But one person advanced a notion that caught me completely off guard: that God is less concerned with whether or not I hit the curve balls and more concerned with just keeping me in the lineup.

I like this idea because, as most everyone who has ever played the game knows, one must first learn how to stay at the plate long enough to learn how to get a single before one can ever hope to start hitting the occasional home run. But do I like this idea because it gets me on base, or gets me off the hook? All comments from those of you who are bored enough to read these blogs are welcome, because I intend to tackle this issue more in the next post.