the Unexpressed Advantage

You gotta love that this week has a theme, but no actual posts related to the theme. Sigh… Too busy; but busy in a good way. I hosted a barbecue dinner tonight. That was fun.

The reason for the theme is that this weekend some folks from my church went over to a local softball field and had a complete duking-of-it-out softball competition. It was the Monday night people vs. the Thursday night people (this is related to home-group meetings during the week). I was on Thursday night and we lost, but only by two points.

It got me thinking about softball and how such a silly game has actually had a fairly profound impact on my life. I won't go into detail on that yet, but sufficed to say that softball is one of those rare things that – although I really shouldn't be thinking that much about it at all – really gets the philosophical cogs in my brain turning.

Like, for instance, how when you start a softball game you never are really prepared to play an actual sport. That is, you're not really expecting actual competition. Softball is fun, it's family fun. It's what church people do (exactly in my case on Sunday) after a church service to pass the time.

So I just kind of show up, without stretching or warming up, and expect to go out there and play well. And the result is a first inning filled with sore feet, torqued back spasms, and mediocre play…

…which is just like a Monday morning at work. To make this Monday morning even more poetic, it was filled with undertones of sore feet, post torqued back pain, and mediocre productivity. All of this certain to leave my colleagues like disappointed batsmen and batswomen – hoping for a knockout performance, expecting at least the norm, and receiving little more than a ground out to shortstop that brings and end to things before they even get started.

Needless to say, I didn't get very much done today. So when I started prepping for the party tonight, I definitely had to have my A game going. We'll call that the second inning…

DKR