Throughout my life I had always been told, “Don’t worry God has a plan for everything”, and most of my life, I blindly agreed. But when the innocence of my youth waned, and I was stranded in the real world, a weird thing happened; I came to agree with that statement. At first it was so difficult to believe that, with all the travesties that plague this earth. Why do one in six people go to bed hungry at night? Why do innocent fathers, children, and wives die? Or why do humans mutilate one another into death through violence and war. Can’t God hear the shrieks of pain, calling for him? Why doesn’t he help? No matter how much I contemplate it I had no true answer, despite this my life told me otherwise.
For me it all started with my childhood joy, baseball. Baseball was my life, I loved the Little League games that were like eating cotton candy at the fair, I loved begging my dad to throw me batting practice, and I loved hitting, especially hitting until the blisters on my hand bled. It was the game that had captured my soul and imagination, and it was all I wanted to play.
I’ll always remember when everything changed; it was my sophomore year of high school and I was furiously scanning a list praying in desperation. How could I be cut from high school baseball after batting clean-up last year? With each and every frantic search that came up empty a deep pain inside me grew until eventually I just wanted to cry. The childish joy inside of me was gone as if an inflated red balloon was run over by a bulldozer. Inside I was mad, at so many things, myself, the coach, but most of all God. He knew how much this mattered to me. I assumed that if he was calling the shots then he was an idiot.
Well 15 shoulder subluxations, one shoulder surgery, and another shoulder surgery scheduled for June; God was no idiot. I can’t help but feel that I was cut from that team in order to save me from myself. For so long baseball was my inspiration, but all of that would have been ripped away from me when the onslaught of shoulder issues finally caught up with me. If I had stayed the route of baseball, I don’t even want to know what would have happened. But at the same time I do know. I know like a warrior believing that I would fight through the adversity in my life, I would have showed how tuff and manly I would be by playing hurt, and not letting it bring me down. Or in other words being a stubborn idiot. Call it luck, or coincidence, or me being a romantic Christian but I can’t help but feel that God spared me, and saved me.