What Are We Going To Do About It?

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I love the game of baseball. I love sports in general, but baseball holds a special place in my heart. There is just something about the game that is so pure. Anyone who knows anything about baseball knows that it can be one of the most frustrating games ever played. Many things can happen in the game of baseball that go against you. A hitter can get in a slump, a fielder could hit a streak of making many errors, a team could go on a losing streak, etc. After all this is the game where the greatest hitters in the game fail 7 out of 10 times. This is one of the reasons why I love the game so much. I love to win and have never been that good at losing or failing. Yet, it is always out of the failures that we as people seem to learn the most. Of course we are not trying to fail and if we could learn the same lessons without failure we would obviously do so but, it is usually just not the case. So what can a game of failures teach us about our Christian lives? It can teach us to continue to move forward and press on to the goal. In Romans 3:23 it says, "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." We can obviously see from this passage that we are all going to sin in our lives. We are all going to fail God at some point in time. I guess my main question is, what are we going to do about it? Baseball is a game of failures but still every player is striving not to fail. Whenever they lose, get in a slump, make an error, or let their team down, it is what they do about it that determines whether they are going to be a great player or not. Will they work to make sure they don't make those same mistakes again or will they let that failure rule over them and hope everything eventually takes care of itself. I can tell you from experience being around the game of baseball, if you are not willing to work nothing ever just takes care of itself. The same can be applied to our Christian lives. We are told in God's word that we will fail because we are an imperfect people. The question is, what are we going to do about it? Romans 6:1-2 says, "What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? Our God is a gracious and merciful God but, I think this passage makes it very clear that if we are not willing to work to fix our problems then God is not willing to forgive us. How can we be forgiven of something we haven't asked repentance for? Simply put, we can't. We must notice our sins and work to make sure that they don't happen again. Just as in the game of baseball if we just sit around waiting for everything to take care of itself then we are in for a rude awakening come judgement day. So as we travel through life let's keep this in mind. Just as baseball is full of failures so is life. It is learning how to grow from that failure and keep from making the same mistakes that makes the best ballplayers and, to me, the best people.

-Ben Stevenson

Excellence in what you do is an important value, especially for those of us who have a conscience. You can’t lie to yourself. If you look back and realize that you could have done better, it’ll eat at you until you fix it. I don’t do anything half way -Cal Ripken Jr.