I love baseball. But this wasn’t always the case.
Even though I grew up with the sport, I never fully embraced it. I guess because what one does not understand, one cannot fully embrace. Or something like that.
I had grown up with football as well. I loved it. I understood it…and I embraced it fully. Perhaps too fully. Football had become my God, the Dallas Cowboys an idol. So much so that in 1988, when I found the one true God, football was given (pardon the pun) the boot. I knew I could not serve two Masters; football simply had to go!
In the early 90s I began to watch baseball on TV. The New York Yankees became my team. Shortly thereafter we got our own team in Colorado, the Rockies, and I became a fast fan. In 1992 and 1994 I gave birth to two sons who would go on to play baseball. I attended their games endlessly and the three of us frequented Coors Field (where the Rockies play) for many a game. I had found a new sport to love.
But while I love baseball, it has not taken me down the path that football did. It is a different kind of love, a more pure love. It is a love that enhances my love of God; it does not detract from it.
And I would never have found baseball if football had not been taken away.
Even though this fact should have been more obvious to me, it never had been. Until a few months ago as I sat on my couch watching “For Love of the Game,” a baseball movie starring Kevin Costner. It is one of my favorites, but my husband, Ric, had never seen it. We watched it together on this night, right before I was to leave on a two-week business trip.
I was emotional as we watched, for a variety of reasons. Baseball movies make me emotional. I was leaving for two weeks and already missing Ric. I had had a few glasses of wine. The list goes on…
At some point during a movie that illustrates just how much baseball means to so many people, it dawned on me: baseball was given to me after football was stripped away. Not immediately, mind you, and not with the same intensity. But I only discovered it when something else was taken away. I am dumbfounded as to why I did not make this connection sooner.
Some say that sports are a microcosm of life. I tend to agree. So I think my conversion from football lover to baseball lover has great implications. Sometimes we have things in our lives that simply must go, for whatever reason. An addiction, a relationship, a fear, a dream. Whatever it is, it just isn’t healthy for us to hold onto anymore. Football had been that kind of thing for me, trite as it may sound. It was just too important in my life. As I always tell people, football was my God.
It hurt to let football go, emotionally and financially. I had accumulated years of memories, many of them in boxes with “Dallas Cowboys” scrolled across them in permanent ink. Those boxes were thrown away, one by one, in 1988. I remember it as if it were yesterday. As the boxes were turned into trash, part of me was lost forever. But not the good part, mind you, only the that had been partaking in idol worship. On that day, part of my heart was discarded along with the t-shirts, calendars and sweatshirts. Though that part of my heart lay dormant, it came back, but in a different, better way around 1993.
There were many other things in my life that I thought were good at the time. Perhaps some of them were; some were not. I am certain all of them served some sort of purpose in making me who I am today and for that I am grateful. I believe everything I have gone through has contributed to who I am…and who I am becoming…so I have learned to embrace all of it, even those things that are sometimes too painful to look at head on or hold on to.
I guess what I am trying to say is, sometimes when something we really love, something we really think we NEED, is taken away, there is always a reason. And there is always something better around the corner. Always. Maybe it takes years to find out what that thing is. After all, it dawned on me nearly 30 years later! The important thing is that I realized I was given a new gift to replace the one I lost. And the new gift was a brand new, shiny, improved model, even better because it did not replace God in my life. In Baseball, I saw God in so many aspects of the game and both of them worked together to give me a redemption I didn't think possible.
As I write this, it is baseball's All Star Break. It is the mid-point of the season where a select few are chosen to play in the infamous All-Star game while everyone else, the not-as-good, get a week off to go fishing or hiking or just chill with a case of beer in front of the TV. For fans like me, it is pure agony as we wait for the wait to be over – and resume our watch-a-game-every-night habit. While I miss watching my favorite sport, I realize, even now, that this “break” is good for me as well. It allows me, once again, to reflect on how easy it was – and still is – for me to get lost in something other than God. For that reminder -- and all the others -- I am humbled and grateful.