Nebraska Synod ELCA

By Pastor Adam Klinker

Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like these past eight years if it did not have baseball in it.

Could I have been a better pastor? Could I have visited more people? Could I have spent a few more hours on that sermon or that worship preparation? Could I have been a better spouse, parent, child, sibling, friend—if I didn’t spend March through July joined to this passion that sometimes drives me to great fits of ecstasy and perplexity?

It doesn’t take me long to realize that it is precisely coaching baseball that makes it possible for me to be or to do any of those things, to experience God in an entirely different vocation and expression. Baseball has given me so many moments and memories of re-creation, so many lessons of how God is at work in my life, to make me new, to make each new day another day of wondering what new thing God will show me.

Baseball is a game where you do indeed have to come new every day, and be prepared to see something astonishing. As a baseball coach, I revel in being able to form young players and watch them grow. I share with them the subtleties of the game, how it is so much more than a physical activity, but a mental and a spiritual challenge where, as a player, you are in control of so very little, where you must accept your limitations and be open to the new thing being birthed in your midst, where you take the best of what you have seen and try to re-create it, even when you’re most likely to fail. Look at a .300 batting average. Where else is a 70-percent failure rate not only acceptable in athletics or in life, but a celebrated accomplishment that might land you among the all-time greats?

Baseball is a game about how you manage the guaranteed failures you encounter. No matter how hard you try, you will strike out. You will make an error. You will throw an 0-2 pitch right down the middle of the plate and watch the other guy do his homerun trot. In theological terms, baseball is a game where you sin boldly, and depend all the more boldly on the grace and love of God—working through teammates, through coaches, through encouragers—to pick you up, to remind you that you are where you are for a reason, and that you have been vouchsafed a place at home.

A phrase I often use among my players is, “Try not to try.” Just be present for what will unfold. You can’t pull the outside fastball. You can’t make the curveball bend. You can’t see the little pebble that’s gonna make for a bad hop. You can’t dwell on the error you made two innings ago. Just take what the game gives and move on. See what happens next. A new thing is coming. It’s bound to be something amazing.

And in that way, baseball is indeed a game of re-creation. It is always being made new. Nothing happens twice quite the same way in any baseball game, and we’ve been playing it for almost 180 years. Moreover, baseball makes me new. Every spring, I’ll still ask myself that same question: What more could I have done without this game in my life? Maybe a lot. But maybe this is exactly what God needs me to be doing so I can be a good spouse, a good father, a good caretaker of people and God’s good Creation and good re-Creation.