Sign the Ball and Kiss My Boo-Boo!

What would you do if you got clobbered on the head with a hard-hit baseball? Keep reading. No pain, no gain” is an expression most of us have heard and many have likely used. The words are often used in reference to exercise, implying that if you don’t feel any pain, you won’t lose weight or gain muscle. Some sources trace the idiom to Jane Fonda in her 1982 video series of aerobic workouts, although Benjamin Franklin said, “There are no gains without pain.” Long before Fonda or Franklin the Bible said, “Count it all joy when you call in to various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience” (James 1:2-3). Trials and testing can be productive. Like muscles that get sore but get stronger from “working out,” so faith does, too. No pain, no gain. Even when we feel the “burn” from life’s various trials and tests, because of the heavenly hope offered in the gospel of Christ, we can, as the apostle Paul directs in Philippians 4:4, “Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I say rejoice.” Paul was in prison [likely in Rome] when he wrote those words about 62 A. D. But he had earlier learned to “sing in the pain” from a prison in Philippi along with his co-missionary Silas (read Acts 16:22-25ff for that amazing attitude and equally amazing results of it).

Let me tell you about Cory down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I don’t know this guy, but he seems to know how to sing in the pain. He was in the news very recently. He is a big fan of the LSU Tigers baseball team and was one of thousands attending a game on Tuesday April 23, 2024, in Baton Rouge. Tyler Nettuno tells about Cory in an article posted @ sports.yahoo.com on April 24. LSU easily defeated the rival team from Nicholls 9-0. The victory was sealed in the bottom of the 8th inning when Tommy White smashed a three-run bomb to left field to give the Tigers a decisive 9-0 lead. That’s where Cory comes into the picture. He was in the bleachers and according to him in an interview before the game ended, the home run ball “was on a rope” and came straight to him. He was even wearing a baseball glove. He caught the high-flying hard ball missile traveling at over 100 mph — not in his glove, but on his forehead! In the interview he said, “Hole in the glove, man, what can I say? Beaned off my dome.” He even showed off a big “goose egg” on his ‘noggin where the ball bounced off his head! When asked if it hurt, he said, “It didn’t feel good.” But he had a great attitude and was laughing and joking about the whole thing. He couldn’t retrieve the ball, which bounced over the fence. But Tigers outfielder Josh Pearson later gave him a warm-up ball between innings. Cory (last name never given) went on to say, “I’ll probably go get Tommy White to sign it for me and maybe kiss my boo-boo.”                                                 

Touché Cory! What an attitude! His words and joyful attitude while wearing a large and no doubt painful “goose egg” on his head bring the words of Revelation 21:4 to mind: “God will wipe every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.” Take heart, hurting Christian friend. Stay faithful to Jesus. Persevere through the pain and the rain. Someday your pain will give way to eternal gain literally out of this world. 

by: Dan Gulley

More Love!

Doug Stone, America country music artist, released a song called “More Love” in 1993. The song, as country songs occasionally manage to do, had a meaningful message. After a relationship fails, the character in the song is trying to figure out what he did wrong. He realizes what she really wanted, and what he should have given her, was “More Love” and less material things. Only too late does he realize it, and she’s gone! My interest is not in that song so much but in the words that are repeated again and again in the song. What she needed from him was “more love.” Who can argue that our world had enough love this morning? And I’m not talking about the romantic kind the world so often portrays when it writes and sings and makes movies and videos about “love.” Sadly, far too often, what the world means when it talks about “love” is in reality not much more that “lust” and, to dust off a Bible word “lewdness.” A good Bible passage that illustrates the point is Romans 13:13-14 where the apostle Paul wrote these words to Christians living in a culture where lust was on the loose: “Let us walk properly, as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts” (New King James Version). The King James translates the words for “lewdness and lust” as “chambering and wantonness,” and the New American Standard Bible (1995) renders them “sexual promiscuity and sensuality.” A point I want to make here is that sexual lust / immorality driven more by hormones and emotions and physical excitement have long been mis-labeled by the world with what the Bible often means when it tells us “love one another.” Just before Paul wrote the words above, he had instructed Christians in  Romans 13:8-10 — “Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery ... not murder ... not steal ... not bear false witness ... not covet,’ and if there is any other commandment, are all summed up in this saying, namely, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” These verses make one thing clear. The world could use a lot more of this kind of love. The shocking frequency of sexual immorality, lust, lewdness, sensuality and what is called “sexploitation”, along with the rest of the harmful, hateful things humans do to each other that dominate daily headlines — surely all this should convince us we need more genuine love.       

Christians know God-like love is not just words, and certainly not just always doing what “feels so right.” The cross of Christ proves that (John 3:16 * Ephesians 5:1-2 * 1 John 3:16-18). God wants His church to love more. The Holy Spirit still speaks through what the apostle Paul wrote in 1 Thess 4:9-10 – “But concerning brotherly love you have no need that I should write to you, for you yourselves are taught by God to love one another; and indeed you do so toward all the brethren who are in all Macedonia. But we  urge you, brethren, that you increase more and more.” There’s always a need for more love!  Love more!

by: Dan Gulley