Forgive as You’ve Been Forgiven (Bot9 #331)
Every once in while you’re reminded of things you’ve written about previously. This past week, it was a core subject of many of my previous writings, as well as one of the principles of Well Coached.
Early this week I received a voicemail on my school phone from a former colleague from early in my career. He was the head baseball coach at the first school where I had worked over 20 years ago and I spent two seasons as his JV coach. I saw the name on the voicemail during a staff meeting and thought, “I wonder what this could be.” During a break between sessions, I called back, left a voicemail and also texted so he knew I was returning the message.
Here’s the thing - our time together wasn’t great. I was coaching the JV in his program, but our JV field was over on the middle school campus away from the Varsity field. I had my own group of kids, vision and place to work them both out every day. We played motivational music during our pregame to fire us up. We had a theme and t-shirts. We did team-building stuff. We had fun and the kids ate it up. The unfortunate part of it was that it created something of a rift between me and the head coach. It got back to me that he said some negative things about what we were doing. They weren’t kind or encouraging, and it created something of an us vs. them mentality. “None of those things help you win baseball games,” is the phrase I remember. It created a divide between us, and it had never been resolved. I left for my first head high school position in 2001 and we went our separate ways.
Back to this week. I was able to take his call right before another meeting and I opened the conversation with joy and excitement to break the ice. It was intentional and seemed to be received well as I asked him what he had been up to, how we was doing, and all of the normal pleasantries. After giving me a rundown of where he’d been and what he’d been doing, he said he was thankful I returned his call. He wasn’t sure if I would. It had been over 20 years since we had spent any time together, and he wanted to say he was sorry for what he had said all that time ago.
Having since received grace myself from Jesus in a powerful way, extending forgiveness over this was not difficult. If I had the opportunity to free him up for something so small and so long ago, I was going to take it. I jumped in and forgave him and thanked him for reaching out. He felt bad it had taken him so long to make such a call, had respected what I had done on the baseball field, and was moving out of state. He’s going to battle cancer closer to his grandkids and I had a chance to extend a prayer and a blessing to him over that.
As I mentioned above, I’ve written about forgiveness a lot. For some reason, baseball seems to bring out quite a bit of negative stuff in people. Heck, maybe it’s just all sports. But it also presents us with some really profound moments to exercise the Gospel. Last week I had a chance to forgive someone else for something that happened on the field this past spring. The thing about refusing to forgive someone gives you a posture of “digging your heels in.” The origin of that saying seems to relate to what it looks like when an animal resists being pull forward. It’s funny when you think about it in that way - your lack of being able to forgive someone resists your own ability to move forward.
The church we attend is called Jubilee Fellowship Church. The word ‘jubilee’ is a reference to a release from debt throughout the land to all inhabitants in the fiftieth year. I love the name of the church because it’s a reminder to us all that we can live in a state of constant jubilee by forgiving one another through the blood of Jesus and the release of the Holy Spirit. We should never take this opportunity lightly. We should take the time to forgive those who have trespassed against us so we might move forward. As a celebration of this idea of jubilee and forgiveness, I’m offering fifty percent off any book order by using the code FORGIVE50 on the Well Coached website. Also, if you’d like to read past writings around forgiveness, check out these offerings from previous editions of Bottom of the Ninth:
Well Coached, Forgiveness (Bot9 #82)