Faith That Won't Crack
Author name
Midweek Message
I’m finally having to retire my old wooden bat. It cracked the other night in our first
tournament game in the men’s church softball league. Before my first game with it two
years ago, Drew kidded me that he didn’t think I’d get a hit with it. He even said he’d
buy my lunch if I did. Turns out, I got a hit on my very first at-bat with it! I’ve been using
that bat ever since.
Players from the opposing team often kid me about my wooden bat, too. For example,
John, the catcher for St. Augustine, always instructs the outfielders to come in when I
step up to the plate, which just inspires me even more to find the hole. I like to tell him
and all the other skeptics and doubters that Jesus used a wooden bat.
I’ve been called “Roy Hobbs” (after the main character of the finest baseball movie ever
made, The Natural) and my bat referred to as “Wonder Boy” (the name of Roy’s wooden
bat). But I’m grateful that my fellow Holey Sox teammates have treated it with respect.
I’ve offered to let them use it, too, but they’re all afraid they’d break it, and none of them
wanted that hanging over their heads!
So the other night at my last at-bat, I popped one up, but it sounded weird. My
teammates immediately said, “Sounds like you’ve got a cracked bat.” We carefully
inspected it, and sure enough, there was a crack in the handle. But it still managed to
bring a runner home on its last hurrah, so you could say it went down swinging!
The origin of this bat remains somewhat clouded in my mind, but I believe it came into
my hands around 1980, when I was about 6 years old. My brother and I used some S&H
Green Stamps (the young people might need to Google what those were) to
purchase some baseball gloves and equipment. That bat got a lot of use for several
years in the playing field in our neighborhood, and then it stood silent in our family’s
garage for decades until we cleaned out the house in 2018 to get it ready to sell. That’s
when I found that old bat again and realized I couldn’t part with it but wanted it in my
garage. So when I got called up to the church softball league in summer 2023, I knew it
was time to get it back out again.
That old bat has gotten me thinking about something Jesus said. He was teaching a
bunch of parables, which are stories about what the kingdom of heaven is like. Stories
about seeds, about weeds and wheat, about precious pearls and such. He wraps it all
up by asking his disciples if they’ve understood any of it. They say they do. And then he
told them “every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the
master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old”
(Matthew 13:52).
There’s a lot of new things in this world, and we can give thanks for a lot of them. But
there are still a few old things lying around, too. Things that have stood the test of time.
Things that don’t break or crack under pressure.
Things like faith, hope, and love (1 Corinthians 13:13).
Things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness,
and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).
We’d drive ourselves batty, wooden we, if we let go of these things?
