If Life is a game of baseball…
June 30 2021
What if life is a game of baseball?
I was thinking about this just last night as my husband and I were driving home from Splendora.
We had gone up to see our daughter’s husband’s brother, who is a firefighter, to pick up the carved, lovely, hand designed sign he had made for us out of heavy metal for our cabin.
After visiting with his charming wife and daughter, and meeting their two new longhorn,
their turtle Ralphy,
the tree frog,
and watching Fallon, their little girl, play with her pet turtle and the house her dad had made for her,
we made the trek back home, stopping in Splendora for some delicious chicken fried chicken, green beans, smashed potatoes with cream gravy and sweet ice tea.
I had been thinking earlier about how, when looking at a mirror, though it might seem to be an exact reflection of us, it actually flips things around and reverses from right to left.
There are a lot of examples of how what seems true, gets flipped like a mirror. Just like how in the bible, Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is here now, but sometimes it seems like bad things happen and we are in hell (haha just kidding) or how we are taught mankind is spiritual and eternal, but we see physical bodies and death.
In other words I was thinking about how a mirror seems to reflect us, but unlike us, what is presented by a mirror is not real, not three dimensional, and cannot give us the complete picture, because it has a limited view. Looking at a mirror, to me, is like looking at the two stories in the bible of creation, where the first, or original story is the real truth, and the second story, flips the truth, like a mirror does, to illustrate or teach.
We know when we look in a mirror, what we see is not the complete picture…and we know that in a mirror, the reverse of what we “see” is true. Jesus understood that reversal of what is true or the “mirror” called life, and could discern the original spiritual “man” instead of the reversal, or physical man, as a result. That is how he was able to heal. I wanted to apply this understanding Jesus had, if I could, to MY understanding of baseball.
So in my “train of thought”, I was thinking if life is a game of baseball, and if opposites or reversals, are how we are taught, through nature and the bible, then these reversals are to help us learn so we can discover heaven on earth. Seeming to lose, can do the reverse, propel us forward, and teach us about winning.
I reasoned then, in my parody of baseball, that the worst team in baseball should, technically, be the easiest to defeat. (we were watching the baseball game on TV during dinner and I heard my husband say something about the worst team in baseball).
I thought to myself that the worst team in baseball would have to be a team with predictable pitches, terrible batters and the worst record. Also, if life is a baseball game, then any “pitch”, no matter how predictable, would still be something that could potentially hurt us, and could also be using us as a target. So, I wondered, how is it that we become an easy “target” for others, in real life? How can we turn it around, and set things up instead to have a no hitter game for our pitcher?
If there are people in our lives we see regularly, who attack us, irritate us, or try to catch us off guard, who seem to successfully be able to take our joy or our peace of mind with just one snide or thoughtless comment then these people are giving us BAD pitches and we are swinging at them…lol.
If these people are those we work with or are some of our family, and if they are always exploding, negative or reactive and mean, then we should KNOW they are compiling a losing record so why would we play for that team, or let down our guard or hand them an easy win? They are predictable and should be easy to defeat but sometimes the easiest team in baseball, still wins because we did not guard our thoughts or “protect the plate.
A win for the worst team in baseball happens, when we let what we KNOW is going to try to “trigger” us, succeed in making us angry, upset, or frustrated or when we let it cause us to stop being kind and loving.
The good news is, we can flip it around and win when we are aware of the environment “see” that pitch, (knowing that no one can take away our joy without our permission) and make solid contact with the ball, by being kind, forgiving, generous and loving in spite of negativity, unfairness, or dishonesty. We do not walk off the field and we do not swing at bad pitches. We find the good pitch and we go for that.
The difficult behaviors of people around us are like curve balls. They come at us deceptively kind at first, and then change direction and try to take us out of our “happy place”. What we do with that pitch is crucial, if we want to help our team (the good guys) win. We can get frustrated, yell, lose our focus, or our perspective, and just react, and when we do this we end up whiffing the ball. If we refuse to be kind in these easy to predict situations, and “ignore” the pitch, we might even get a “strike” called on us.
If life is a baseball game, we have to swing at honest attempts by difficult people, and do our best to make contact with the ball in a solid way. We cannot swing at bad pitches, or react to taunts or threats. We have to take what was meant to strike us out and still get a hit. We have to be able to consistently accomplish some good goal, in the face of nasty, mean spirited or angry people.
The only way I know how to do this is by using prayer.
I have been picking a random daily bible verse to inspire me and I feel that prayer communicates directly to me about what is going on in my life, specifically, by helping me to see meaning in ordinary things and helping me understand what message is being communicated. And when things truly seem stressful, because of circumstances or events, I might even pick more than one bible verse during the day to think about.
If pitches are words, then prayer, and bible verses are like good coaches…and can help us recognize the delivery of any words that are solid, fair and true; words that can be responded to with a solid swing of the bat and be catapulted outward to the world, to become words that can inspire and uplift our entire team, or in the case of baseball, can result in a home run.
Our words do not only affect us, they affect others. When we are able to take a bad situation, and turn it around so that it not only helps us but it helps those around us, we have effectively hit a grand slam in baseball…something we, in my family, affectionately call a “grand salami”.
I love how Jesus spoke in parables, stories that used examples we could see, to help us understand things we could not see. Things like mirrors and contrasting stories about the same thing, like genesis one and genesis two, are there to teach us how to discover what is real, what is heaven, what is here now.
So as we left Splendora, with me carrying a take out because I could not fit all my chicken fried chicken in my tummy. The rain was building up in the low hanging clouds ahead and I was still thinking about reversal and my baseball game scenario. As I watched the sky, it was beautiful, dark windy and rainy on one level and bright and sunshiny on another level. I snapped photos of this as we made our way through the Grand parkway, and it was not until I got home and looked at the photos that I noticed another “reversal”.
I realized by looking at the photos, that when, in life, we are in the midst of a “storm” it looks like darkness is “on top” or “winning”. But the truth is the reverse, or the opposite. When we can step back from the storm, literally (or metaphorically), we can clearly see that light is what is on top…all the time. Heaven is on top, or wins, when we can see the bigger picture and change our perspective.
Isn’t that SO FREAKING NEAT??? It was one of those “conversion” moments where there was total clarity, how the reverse of what we are presented with, from a human standpoint, is what is real about each of us. That spiritual truth, when we can perceive it, IS heaven on earth! Isn’t it time we start hitting grand salami’s in this baseball game called Life?
Isn’t God so smart with his teaching and his timing? God is always looking out for us when we feel we might be getting stuck, and even in the middle of a rainstorm we can learn something awesome and have a conversion experience, get a hit, and score the winning run. Gimme that bat! I got this!
