A Game That Tests Failure

Just completed another season playing baseball.  It is still a kick playing the game that I have loved since my youth.  I got started playing baseball as an adult when Debsue sent me to Indians Fantasy Camp for my 40th birthday.  I had been playing in some pretty competitive softball leagues in the NE Ohio area.  But once I stepped foot on the hardball diamond and started playing that game again, I was hooked.  That was twelve years ago.

I play with the Kent Mudhens in the Roy Hobbs 47 and over league.  I have kind of made my way along starting in the 38 and over and then retiring from that an moving up an age group.  I also play in a 38 and over Cleveland baseball league as a part-time player for the Bay Bisons.  We play from early May through August.  We also play in late October, early November in Florida for a week. 

Baseball is a tough sport.  Kind of like golf, it tests your ability to accept failure.  By way of illustration, about three weeks ago, I had a great game on a Sunday afternoon where I hit three doubles in a game in addition to a single and a walk.  The sound of a solid hit just kind of sticks with you and I had three solid doubles in that game.  My daydreams rehearsed those hits over and over again.  Unit Tuesday that is when I played for the Bisons on Tuesday night.  They hit me cleanup and I promptly went 0 for 5 with two double plays and striking out with the bases loaded.  As if that wasn’t enough, I lost a fly ball in the lights in left field.  A truly humbling experience.

Fast forward a week to that team when we played a much better team in the playoffs.  We were tied 2-2 going into the top of the eighth (we were visitors).  We got men on 2nd and 3rd with two out and our number three hitter up (I hit cleanup again – I guess they didn’t learn enough from the previous game).  They intentionally walk our guy to face me with the bases loaded.  The drama is further enhanced because the opposing pitcher and I played as teammates for eight years.  He gets to one ball and two strikes and my instincts are just to put the ball in play, but he grooves one and I line it into the gap driving in all three runners and then I score also as the ball gets by the catcher.  So now we are up 6-2 going into the ninth.  Unfortunately, we could not hold the lead and lost 7-6.  My teammates called me the “would-be hero”. 

The following Sunday, our Mudhens team got absolutely clobbered 23-2 by a fairly mediocre team.  I had never seen us so poor.  We normally are a good team.  I crowned my performance with a 1 for 5 hitting.  My last at-bat was an embarrassing strikeout captured by my wife below.  You can hear my little groan as I miss the last pitch.

Dan strikeout from Dan Quigg on Vimeo.

I have a hard time accepting failure.  In baseball, I would fling my bat, utter a profanity here and there.  Most times my teammates didn’t hear my response, but they certainly could see my reaction.  Baseball like life tests the crucible of our inner fabric.  We all fail, but it is how we learn and respond that tests who we really are.  After a major business failure a few years back, I find I am a better person.  I am much more aware of who I am.  I also find that failure means that we take success much more in stride.  I am not in any way saying that we shouldn’t strive for success.  However, failure is really what makes us what we are. 

I found that my failure makes me more pliable, more useful to God, and more sympathetic to others.  God doesn’t shield Christ followers from failure.  He uses failure to make us better people.  Even the great hitters experience some failure.  Winners of batting titles fail 2 out of 3 times.  The game makes us good at striving for success but able to use failure to make us better.

Forty Years of Friendship

My in-laws posted this picture at their annual lobster fest.  They host this annual feast at their cottage in Northwest Indiana.  They have been friends with this group for forty years.  Through thick and thin.  Hard to get my head around that long a time.  In our transient culture, developing longstanding deep relationships is tough.  We are now in the sound bite generation.  Yet “social media” has reopened a number of relationships.  I have reconnected with my former Valparaiso fraternity big brother after many years through Facebook.  I have also reconnected with old family friends from our growing up years.

Relationships mean a lot to God.  God has wired us for this type of deep, personal relationships.  We have a group that we get together with for fellowship and bible study that we have known for nearly twenty years.  We know there is no burden that we can’t share.  The ladies get together for breakfast once a month and share each other burdens.  We know we don’t have to impress them.  They accept us as we are. 

Then there is my CLC group which has been meeting faithfully every week (14 of us men) for over a year and a half.  I love those guys.  We have ages ranging from mid 20’s to early 80’s.  When I was in my twenties and thirties, relationships really didn’t matter much to me (except immediate family relationships).  But friendships really matter to me now that I am in my mid fifties.  My kids are out of the house and while I have a great marital relationship, the extension of good friends is so important. 

Each of us has to have those kinds of friendships.  Friends that you can be truly transparent with.  Friends to bear burdens with.  We can’t be all that God intended for us to be without friends like that.

The Way of Wisdom

Our pastor Joe is teaching a series on wisdom.  This is the second of the series.  Like many of Pastor Joe’s sermons, it is incredibly insightful.  This morning’s title was the Way of Wisdom.  The four points were:

1) Know God – find a way daily to remind yourself of how great God is and how much He has done for you.  Every morning we wake up hungry looking for value.  If we don’t seek God as the source of that value, we will look for it elsewhere.  If you don’t seek that value, you will do foolish things in your own wisdom.

2) Know Yourself – Proverbs 3:5 says to “trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding”..  Every day you need to deflate yourself and not think too much of yourself.  I can never think too much of myself when the God of the universe had to sacrifice His son to save me.  Yet God thought so much of me that He did just that.  Pastor Joe made reference to this clip from Toy Story which is perfect for this point.

3) Know God’s Word – God provides the handbook, the “database of best practices” that we can use to discover Him and wisdom.

4) Trust God’s Way – Dive into God’s love knowing that He desires the absolute best for you.  Recognize that pain will be an implicit part of the process.  Pain is never thought by our children as positive but they are able to look back and see the benefit it brings.  Pain is part of the process of learning wisdom.

It’s Not Somebody Else’s Fault

In the wake of the massacre of Aurora, Colorado, people have had a chance to reflect on one of the biggest mass shootings in history.  There are stories of heroism.  Three men gave their lives while protecting their girlfriends. 
Twenty-five-year-old Jon Blunk was sitting next to his girlfriend, Jansen Young, at the midnight premiere of "The Dark Knight Rises" when the gunman opened fire in the dark theater. Blunk instinctively pushed his girlfriend to the ground and threw his body on top of hers. Blunk, a security guard, served five years in the Navy and was in the process of re-enlisting in hopes of becoming a Navy SEAL, family and friends said. He was killed in the gunfire; his girlfriend survived.  Twenty-four-year-old Alex Teves dived on top of his girlfriend, Amanda Lindgren, when the gunfire erupted. Covering her body, he took the bullets so they did not harm her. She survived the massacre; he did not.  Matt McQuinn, 27 years old, threw his body in front of his girlfriend, Samantha Yowler, as the shooting continued. Yowler survived with a gunshot wound to the knee; McQuinn's body absorbed the fatal shots. Or this 13 year old girl who tried to save the 6 year old girl she babysat for.

The thing that is bothersome to us though is the people who look to lay blame for this.  For example, the lawyer who filed an immediate lawsuit on behalf, not of one of the victims or even one of those hurt.  He blames the theater, the doctors, and Warner Bros for the shooting.  Give me a break!  I searched the web and found a preponderance of ads looking to “help” victims of the shooting.  Where there is senseless evil, there always seems to be somebody looking to profit from it.  Tragedies like this bring out the best and the worst of us.  James Holmes was troubled individual who acted ALONE!  There is a cost to the lawyers who want to “help”.

It seems that we want to always look for blame to others when we sin.  The point is that we all sin and no amount of blame can make up for that fact.  No amount of security, no amount of preventative medicine, no amount of litigation.  Our litigious society has now added a cost to the blame game that continues to cripple our country.  Do we really think that these lawyers do this out of the goodness of their heart.  I am not sure which is worse, James Holmes or the lawyers that seek to profit.  A deranged man is just that, a deranged man.  How can we protect a culture from a deranged man?  From most accounts, he acted fairly rationally and gave little clues this was going to happen.  It simmered seemingly just below the surface.  

To some level, we all are just as potentially dangerous as James Holmes.  It does not take much to act like him.  We live in a fallen, depraved world where Satan would love to have an army of James Holmes.  And it would not take much for each of us to act in similar ways.  It is not a big gap between the anger we feel and express and the anger that caused a man to shoot up a movie theatre.  That is what Jesus was saying when he says that those who insult our brother are as guilty as a murderer.

On the contrary, there are the heroes, the rays of hope who stand as evidence that there is also good that can come out of even the worst of situations.  These heroes are symbols of the ultimate sacrifice Jesus paid as he entered our fallen world. 

God is Good No Matter What

It is very easy to look at things from a human lens.  I guess that is because we are human.  Several weeks ago while we were in church, we received a distress call from our daughter who was on her way home and had a major accident on the highway near Chicago.  I won’t repeat the story – you can find it on Debbie’s blog here.  The bottom line is that our daughter by all rights based on what happened should have been killed or severely injured, but she wasn’t.  She walked away from an accident that any other time of the day or week would have been far worse.  She did not hit any other car or hurt any other person.  The car spun 360 degrees on the highway and struck the median as shown below. 

It was an act of grace.  Bethany was not hurt.  We might even say she was spared.  But we have godly friends who lost a son due to a freak accident.  Are we any more spiritual than they are?  Hardly so.  For some reason, God did not take Bethany home that night.  It was grace.  Our friends had to take years of heartache and dig deep down into their relationship with Christ to even persevere.  Their son’s faith encouraged many to come to faith likewise and the parents have also been used of God to tell their story.

I am reminded of two simple truths.  First, we live in a fallen world and as a result, Christians endure pain and suffering as much as non Christians.  In fact, Christians endure more pain because they name the name of Christ.  Secondly,  God gives grace.  He gives grace to each of us to enter into a relationship with Him through Jesus Christ.  That relationship overshadows the trouble of this life.  When God takes a Christian out of this life, there is reason to celebrate because they are home.  He also provides the grace in this life to persevere in the loss of loved ones.  Paul says whether we live or die, we are the Lords.

We can love a God who is so infinite and loving despite the circumstances of this life.  My God is not a genie in a bottle.  He is a loving Father that I can trust fully no matter what. 

Words of Affirmation

Women really don’t understand the power they have over men.  You would have thought we would have learned from people like Samson, but we didn’t.  We men have to know that the women in our lives support us and affirm us. 

Example #1 – James Braddock’s wife does not want him to fight and had he gone into the ring, his brain would have been pummeled to mush.  But she goes into the locker room and he comes out of there a new man.

Then there is this Rocky classic.  He is about to go into the ring with Apollo Creed with a gut on him my size.  But all it takes is Adrian telling him “WIN”, then the usual montage of Rocky willing himself into the best shape of his career.

Ok, so that is the movies and this is real life.  Yes, it is but it happens outside of Hollywood too.  My wife and I have this thing where when I am on my way home, I let her know via text message and these are the types of response she gives me (used with permission).

Dan – Leaving now, home in 30
Deb – My heart swelleth in loove for you.
Dan – Home in 30
Deb – The sun shines brighter just knowing that.
Dan – Home in 30
Deb – Rejoicing in holy matrimony!
Dan – Home in 30
Deb – Oh how sweet that sounds.
Dan – Home in 25 (was on my way then)
Deb – Oh shivers of marital joy
Dan – Home shortly
Deb – My day is now completely full of joy

Now I know that sounds completely hokey, but it doesn’t matter what has happened that day.  These words affirm me, they build me up.  I know it’s coming and I know it’s corny but I love it.  When we mentor young couples, we remind them how much they need to know the love language of the other.  My wife knows for me it is words of affirmation.  She builds me up.  It may not have the Hollywood flair, but it works.

Remembering Rwanda

In 2005, I visited Rwanda as part of a team from World Vision.  The little video montage I put together captured the essence of the trip.  It was a life changing trip for me.  Rwanda is a small country the size of Maryland with about 9 million residents.  Rwanda went through a horrendous genocide in 1994 when between 700,000 and 1 million Rwandans were systematically slaughtered mostly in a one month killing season.  So imagine about 10% of the country being killed.  Neighbor slaughtered neighbor, friends slaughtered friends, and even family member slaughtered family member.  The distinction over who lived and who died was whether they were Tutsi, a somewhat arbitrary ethnic determination originally started by the Belgians when they were in charge of the country. 

I have read most every book on Rwanda I can find.  The common theme is that those that took life depersonalized their neighbor, their friend, their family member.  The interviews revealed the lie that the taking of life was part of a mission almost a job.  The killers would go out systematically and slaughter and then come back for a little party at the end of the day.  They did not see a person, they saw a task.  Those that survived commented that they could see a lifeless person in their attacker.  Also interestingly, the church was no refuge.  In several instances, people were urged to go to a church as a safe haven only to have priests turn on them and be slaughtered.

Can this thing happen today?  Absolutely!  Rwanda was essentially a “Christian country”.  Do we realize it is the presence of the Holy Spirit today that keeps us from this happening anywhere today?  The Holy Spirit is what moves and causes us to see people as they are in God’s image.  If the Holy Spirit were not here as will happen in the end times, that people will have no restraint.  Satan will have a field day as there will be no restraining element at all.  Do we realize that we are so utterly depraved that rampant killing could easily occur any time at any place?  People left to their own devices are incredibly evil. 

Thankfully that is not the end of the story.  Rwanda has experienced rebirth.  It started with the supernatural power of forgiveness.  People had to have a special dose of the Holy Spirit to forgive their attackers.  And they did.  The Holy Spirit gives incredible power to forgive and rebuild relationships.   We visited Rwanda again in 2009 and again saw the power of forgiveness.  Rwanda could be have completely disintegrated, but it did not.  It is an example of renewal by the Holy Spirit.