Following God’s will takes practice

Watching the strike zone

I’ve loved baseball since I was a little girl. Living in Fayetteville and being a Hog fan, baseball season is one of the most fun times of the year.

I used to love to watch my grandson Hayden play baseball. He was a left-handed pitcher, which made him valuable to his team.

There is a duel going on between pitcher and batter.

Young pitchers struggle to hit the strike zone. Being a really good pitcher takes skill, a lot of practice and maturity. The less experienced a pitcher is the more likely he — or in the case of softball, she — is to “miss the mark” of the strike zone.

The word for sin in Greek is “harmatia” and it means “to miss the mark,” or to fall short of God’s goal for you. So often when one sins it isn’t specifically because you want to disobey God and hurt yourself or others, many times it is because doing what God requires of us, what God wants us to be doing, isn’t what we want for ourselves. We may think that our wants and desires aren’t necessarily bad or sinful, but if they aren’t what God’s goals for us are, then we are “missing the mark” and sinning.

Following God’s will takes a lot of practice, just as pitching and batting in baseball take practice. We miss the mark with most of our actions because the world is so permeated with opportunities to think of ourselves rather than others. And each time we don’t love our neighbor as much as we do ourself — when we want that parking space and think bad thoughts about the person who got it before we could get there, when we get angry on the road at someone who cuts us off, when we don’t take the time to help that person who is struggling to get through the door with all of those packages — when we do those tiny little things that prioritize our own time and our own desires rather than living for Jesus Christ and others we are “missing the mark” of how God wants us to live, and we are sinning.

We are like a pitcher who just barely misses the strike zone, who misses the mark, and it’s called a “ball” whether it was one inch off or thrown over the catcher’s head. We are like the batter who swings at a ball and misses it, or perhaps hits it and fouls it off so that it doesn’t go into the field, but it counts as a strike all the same. (Unless, of course, it’s the third strike — so baseball fans will have to excuse where the metaphor fails in that instance.)

Like a pitcher and batter practice at their skill, usually with a coach, a follower of Jesus Christ can work toward not sinning through the “coaching” of scripture and attending to one’s walk with Jesus Christ through a family of faith (a church).

At each moment of life, God sends to us the opportunity to follow God’s will. Like a batter watching for a pitch, we can talk to God about God’s will, and with practice we can be better at following the path God has before us. Thankfully God doesn’t keep score. Through Jesus Christ we have many more than three strikes!