The Relational Mission

Have you ever heard about baseball hitters "being in a slump." It refers to an extended time when a player is not hitting the ball well. Unlike basketball or football where the way to break out of a period of below average performance is to either get more aggressive or to rest your body so that you can return with more vigor and effort, the approach in baseball is slightly different. Aggression actually works against you in baseball. Hitting a ball consistently is about allowing your mind and body to relax so that you can swing in a fluid motion that naturally connects with a ball in an unforced manner. The times when I have hit the ball the hardest were the times when I was not trying to swing the hardest. Every time a hitter tries to over-swing he misses the chance to actually apply the restful force that results in a hard hit ball. So to break out of a slump, one has to train the mind and body to exert effort in a restful manner. It sounds counter-intuitive, but that is...

Last night I was teaching a class about how we have to practice church in order to be the church. I was challenging the notion that the practice of church life is primary shaped by our public meetings. I then began to reflect on my years of playing baseball and I realized how many of the drills that we would do don't actually look much like what we did on the field. While there was a resemblance, we would do things with a bat and ball which would be absolutely absurd to do in a game. I'll just site one example: multi-million dollar super-star players will hit a ball off a tee into a net, the same kind of tee my six year old uses in his games. Now if you saw a 250 pound slugger hitting a ball off a tee in a game, that would be just weird, but that is exactly what they do in practice. The way we practice when no no one is looking shapes how we live as the church when people can see us. This goes so far beyond things like having a personal quiet time or being morally upright w...

Last night, we took our second son to his first T-ball practice. It's remarkable to watch kindergardeners demonstrate real life "comedy of errors." In fact, everything they do is an error at this age. Then I got to thinking about how experienced players play the game a baseball and how the same is true there. Every play, every pitch, every swing, every act contains some aspect of a mistake. If the batter hits the ball, it's usually due to a mistake on the pitcher's part. Most of the time, the batter does not hit the ball, which means that to be a good hitter, you are going to make lots of mistakes. The fact is that a professional baseball player will get into the hall of fame if he is successful 1/3 of the time. This means that even the best hitters fail at least 66% of the time. Baseball is full of mistakes. But that's why players practice. They aim to get good enough to overcome those mistakes because they know that they cannot be eliminated. Life is ful...

It's time for baseball. This week our oldest plays his first baseball game and your second plays his first t-ball game. As I have watched them practice I am reminded about how hard this game is. To hit a small ball being thrown at you in unpredictable ways and then run around bases, but when you are on a base you can only advance when the ball hits the ground, but you can tag up after a ball is caught in the air. Wow! I'm confused and I have lived inside the game since I was eight. I say this because baseball does not come naturally. Like any other sport, it requires focus training and practice. No successful baseball player just picks up a bat, ball and glove and knows what to do and is immediately good at it. Baseball provides a good perspective on what it means to become missional. Some of us think that we will be missional if we just will our way into it. All we need is a desire to do something. Wrong! I've seen a lot of people who wanted to do good but when they ve...