Keeping the Faith

Last night was Joe’s first baseball game of the season. How shall I word this? They got creamed. (I believe 16-1 was the final score.)

Dickens’ words were ringing in my ears (“It was the best of times…it was the worst of times…”) when—for the first time in his budding career—my son took to the pitcher’s mound in the 4th inning. Is that my little man up there? I thought. How does he throw the ball that far? He looks really professional! He…is walking player after player.

And he was one of the best pitchers of the evening.

Really, it was their skills (or lack thereof) in the outfield that did them in. It was, I kept telling myself, the first game of the season—but the other team, a bigger team, used this to their advantage. By the end of the 5th inning I couldn’t take it. (They play six innings total.) I packed up the girls and told my husband we’d see them at home. Please don’t think that I’m a big fat quitter for having done this—it was 60 degrees if even that and the girls’ hands were pink with cold.

Welcome to springtime baseball in Minnesota.

The first words out of my son’s mouth when he burst through the front door were, “I need a hot bath!” We were soon gathered ‘round the table for a late-night family meal of buttered bread and hot dish—like I’ve said, we’re Minnesotan—and some spirited talk of the evening’s game. We joked and laughed about the game’s ups and downs, and what struck me most about the conversation was my son’s focus.

He wasn’t worried about the players he walked. He wasn’t worried about the ball he dropped. He was excited about his hit in the 6th inning.

(The one I missed by being a big fat quitter. Dang it!)

And that, my friends, made me smile to see: the shining eyes of a 5th grade boy who got a hit in the 6th inning. His mistakes were there and he’d talked with his dad on how to be better…

…but in the end, it was the hit that mattered.

Ad majorem Dei gloriam,