Day One Thousand and Thirty-One

The Tenth Zephyr Start

Baseball will teach you a lot about yourself. It's a beautiful, terrifying game that exposes your strengths, your weakness, your successes, and your failures for all of everyone to see. It's humbling. It's exhausting. It's exciting. It'll take you places you've never dreamed of and then crash you to smithereens without a second of notice. 

In this game, if your life is rooted in anything besides faith in a sovereign God, it's hard for me to understand how someone could deal with such extreme highs and even more extreme lows. It's true that baseball is a game of failure. And it's in failure, I believe, that we learn the most about ourselves. Without God, your failures and successes - and how you react to them - define you. In Christ though, Christ's redeeming work on the cross alone defines you. There's no failure He can't overcome. There's no success He can't sweeten. This reality makes failure less damaging and victory more rewarding. 

All that to say, Adam's struggle this season can't define him. He's learning more than ever before: about the game, but even more about his Savior. And in that, there is sweet, sweet victory.  So yeah, the guy had another rough outing. He was sick. And it was hard. And it stunk. And it was frustrating. But he's still the same guy and he's still defined by the same God. Even if the baseball field says differently. 

His line:

2.1 IP, 7H, 6R, 6ER, 3BB, 2K and the L. 

He's experiencing his first ever slump, but the good news: there's nowhere to go but up from here!