Softball 4.0 – Does It Even Matter?

I’m trying to gather– or maybe a better word is corral and assign labels to– my thoughts from the last 3 days. Was Monday just a few days ago? If you told me that last week was May, I’d believe you. If you told me yesterday was only 24 hours long, I’d think you should be locked up in a looney bin. Time is, at the same moment, standing still and rushing by like a river. I don’t really want to share details right now about why my heart is heavy, why my mind is racing, what this week will mean as a landmark in my own life so I’ll scoot right along to something more related to the title of the post.

Softball.

If your favorite D-1 college football team loses and you think to yourself, “It’s just a game,” first of all good for you. It’s literally just a game. So with that framework, adult league slow pitch softball is where on that college football scale? So so so so far down and even more of “just a game” than any college sport. That sentiment rang true again this week when I was able to hobble through a softball game against some old-timers (meaning= fantastic batters) in which the old-timers destroyed us by like 57 runs. And I was the pitcher so imagine how it feels to be such a good strike-thrower that EVERYONE gets a hit. That’s sarcasm by the way. The dilemma for a pitcher is this: You have to be accurate enough to toss strikes, but then somehow not let the other team get hits? It’s the conundrum of conundrums.

Because of this other stuff going on in the life of my immediate family (the heavy heart stuff), I walked off the softball field not the slightest bit concerned that I could’ve played better defense or hit the ball harder when I was batting. The phrase that kept coming to mind, and I mean this in a philosophical/ spiritual/ big picture way, not in a lazy, judgmental way… “Who cares?” So what that our team lost (or won or hit good or hit bad or we had errors or we made amazing plays)? There are people out there with real problems, some life and death, so what is a random Thursday night softball game compared to that? It’s nothing. I have a history of being snarky when I’m upset in sports, whether it’s about a bad call from an official or an opposing team verbally jabbing at one another. In the big picture, it’s all fluff. Of course, even in the fluff, my attitude matters. How I treat my teammates and the other team matters. Their journey in life is what matters, not what’s on the scoreboard or if the guy who slid into second was called safe or out.

But I’ll say this, my leg still hurts from last week and it’s weird to not be out there running, biking, swimming like I had been doing all summer. I guess even THAT is something I should just hold off to the side, not a part of life that has deep significance. So I’m hanging on to what I’ve learned in church. God is good. He is in control. Even when I don’t quite see it and definitely don’t understand. And also…

I should go to the batting cage. My softball batting is atrocious!

-Out of the Wilderness