Wanting It More (Bot9 #292)
15 or so years ago I read Buzz Bissinger’s book, 3 Nights in August. You might remember Bissinger’s name from authoring Friday Night Lights, the great book exploring Texas high school football. For this book, though, he trained his narrative gift on Tony LaRussa and a three-game series between the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs. It’s a great book for any baseball person and it was formative for me as a young baseball coach. Because of that book, I found a quote from LaRussa I used in the early days of our current program in which he said, “You have to tell them to want it.”
As a young coach, I quickly learned that we tend to want to win more than our athletes. I remember one of my ADs telling me, “You’re always going to want to win more than they do.” I found that to be so strange, but have also found this to be quite true. The rare ones match your intensity and focus. Those players are fun to coach. If you’re lucky, you get a group of them at the same time. However, most are dragging behind and you’re constantly trying to ignite something inside of them. They’re like arrows without a target, just shooting into the dark.
As an older coach, now 20 years in, the same idea holds true, but the focus is different. Yeah, winning is great and you don’t enter the arena of competition without a desire to win. But now the focus is the spiritual lives of each athlete, helping them to realize a deeper relationship with the Lord. We desire for them to experience the same wisdom or peace or whatever it is that has brought you to your current phase of relationship with Jesus, but you seem to want it more than they do.
It makes me think of the Rich Young Ruler in Mark 10:17-22. Here’s a guy who comes to Jesus to ask what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus outlines elements of the Law and it seems the man has checked all of those boxes. Then another challenge is presented:
Looking at the man, Jesus felt genuine love for him. “There is still one thing you haven’t done,” he told him. “Go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
At this the man’s face fell, and he went away sad, for he had many possessions.
Most of the time this story is taught to get us to focus on spiritual treasure over worldly treasure. That absolutely makes sense. But I wonder if there’s more to this as well. Did the free will of the rich young ruler get in the way? Jesus had something to offer him. Jesus. Not some guy. Jesus. But the rich young ruler didn’t want what Christ had for him, he wanted what he already had. Ultimately he wanted his own will as well as his possessions.
The people we influence are really no different. Our confidence comes from the deep experiences we’ve had with Jesus, the times you can reflect upon which have allowed you to know He knows you and you know Him. At the end of the day, they have to want that same thing on their own. They have to journey on their own, even if that means walking into the desert on his own.
It seems one of God’s main concerns is wanting to grow closer to each of us and allowing us to make whatever choices we’re going to make in the process. Take a look at the story of the Prodigal Son. The prodigal goes out and messes up his life. The older brother stays at home and gets ticked off when his brother returns. The father goes to both of them. He runs to the prodigal when he sees him back on the property and he tries to draw the older brother into the celebration. In both cases, the father allows the brothers to make their own decision.
In the light of these individual choices, have you ever considered how beautiful baseball really is?
We can’t throw a pitch for the players. We can’t swing the bat for them. Sure we can put on a shift, call a pitch, or put on a play, but some of that seems just unnatural to the spiritual elements of the game. At its core, the game is a pitch thrown with a round ball towards a man with a round bat. What happens in that moment is up to God. It’s what makes baseball such a beautiful spiritual exercise.
The spiritual life is the same as we try to influence others. We speak and watch and observe. They live. And we weep when they go another direction or have to do it their way or have to experience something to get to where you’ve already been. We’re always going to want it more for them than they want it themselves because we’ve experienced His presence. All we can do is watch and hope…just like God does for each one of us.