It is no secret that I love baseball. It is my son’s chosen sport. He loves to play and I have grown to love it as well. As with most anything I do, I haven’t gone half way on my engagement with baseball. I love the history and I enjoy learning how to help my boy become better and better.
Over the years I have seen a large number of baseball games from youth levels up to the professional. I have come to appreciate defense and pitching much more than the offensive aspect of the game. Baseball Tonight’s “Web Gems” is one of my favorite bits of television.
I used to be in awe of the great diving plays. Now, I see them with a bit of a different eye. Some of them are the result of miraculous ability. However, I am learning that most of them are the result of guys being our of position or getting a bad jump on the ball.
When a guy takes two steps to the left or right we don’t typically sit in awe. We should.
The mundane and average play is typically the result of the player being in perfect position or reading the ball off the bat before the camera gets to him. You see, more often than not the average and mundane is so because the player has done the remarkable, he showed up in the right spot at the right time.
As we move forward with the Antioch Movement we must embrace the mystery and beauty of the average and mundane in our every day world. We so often want the BIG, the GRAND, the SPLENDOR, of something that leaves us in awe. We want this so bad that we busy ourselves with the show. In the midst of that we miss the person next to us suffering quietly. We don’t see the single mom just wishing someone would give her a night off. The child who gets one free meal at school is nothing but a blip on our radar. The barista who just got dumped by her boyfriend who had been living with her for five years causes frustration in our life because she messed up our order.
The average and mundane.
The gospel is all about the average and mundane. When we live as a gospel community we will be more concerned about the average and mundane and celebrate what God does in the midst of us just being in the right place at the right time.
