Coach Jose

Let me take a moment to explain my awe with Coach Jose. Coach Jose is my son's T-Ball coach. T-Ball, remember that? 5 year-olds and 6 year-olds (with a couple of 4's thrown in just to keep it interesting) on a ball field spinning around, kicking dirt in the infield, pulling up grass in the outfield, poking each other, and watching baseballs rolling by them.

If it's a boy or girl's first year, they know nothing about the game, especially if they have a non-baseball dad like me. They have few skills and a six-minute...tops...attention span.

Coach Jose has a background coaching baseball, real baseball, I think, high school kids. He is very knowledgeable. He told us he had never coached little kids before. Over the past several weeks, I have watched Coach Jose do drills, run bases, and explain the game to these kids. He is ever so patient. He goes over and over the fundamentals. Most of them don't remember. They will drill for an hour: catch the  ball..step...point...throw it to first base. The next practice, they have to start all over again except for maybe one or two that have a vague memory of doing something like that last week. Coach Jose doesn't get upset, he simply starts over again...catch...step...point...throw. I honestly don't know how he does it. It seems like somewhere deep inside he is 100% confident that each of those kids is going to get it, going to be a star, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

I get so agitated when people don't get it...when I don't get it. I have been on this spiritual path for so long and yet I feel like i never even get the basics down. I screw up, I don't pay attention. Then I look around at those I lead and, I hate to say, I get even more frustrated. "C'mon! We have gone over this time and again and it still hasn't sunk in even a bit!"

For myself and my fellow sojourners, I am going to follow my new idol, Coach Jose. "Alright Yankees, let's do it again: catch...step...point..throw"

Our Opportunity

I am currently reading Eugene Peterson's A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. (You can peak at my reading notes here.) Peterson's seems to be saying that we all want our religious or spiritual fix, but there is very little interest in "the long obedience," the work required, quoting Friederich Nietzche, to make life worth living.

Peterson quotes a psychiatrist: "Thomas Szasz, in his therapy and writing, has attempted to revive respect for what he calls the 'simplest and most ancient of human truths: namely, that life is an arduous and tragic struggle; that what we call "sanity," what we mean by "not being schizophrenic," has a great deal to do with competence, earned by struggling for excellence; with compassion, hard won by confronting conflict; and with modesty and patience, acquired through silence and suffering."

Good stuff. It offers us an awesome opportunity to shift our perception. The struggles, the confrontation, the conflict, the silence, the suffering, aren't elements of life to be avoided. They are tools to be used to grow. Of course, remembering to live in that stream is important.