Lingerdog's World

I don't mean, say I got hit in the head with a softball, but rather I think about it near constantly now.

See, last June I weighed 385 pounds, I was out of shape, and didn't really care about getting into shape, and then some bad things happened and in the course of it I dropped forty pounds.

At this time I also started going to church for the first time in twelve years. A great little church that seems to be growing called Liberty Baptist Church. It's located between York and Rock Hill in South Carolina.

As I started going there, I started attending the softball games in the fall league, my brother played and I figured it would help keep my mind off the things I had went through in June. And it worked pretty well, and I realized that it looked really fun, and that I wanted to play.

I was encouraged by my brother to speak up about wanting to play, but as I told him, I was way to out of shape, and having not played in fifteen years, I couldn't just jump back in there and start costing them games.

So I took the gains I had made in the weight loss arena and ran with them, being down 75 pounds at the last time I checked, which was a few months ago. I started watching videos on youtube to help me work on my swing and any catching and throwing tips I could find.

When I could get a chance, I would hit off my sons tee-ball tee. I would throw when I had someone to throw with.

We started talking about putting together a men's league team to compete at a higher level than church co-ed.

As spring approached I was hit in the face with a ball and decided I didn't want to play on a men's league team anymore. I decided it would be better, safer even to work on my game for at least a season with the church team before I risked getting out there with a men's team.

Spring arrived and we signed up for the church team, and a friend contacted my brother about playing on his men's team, he told me if I wanted I could come and practice with them, and so I did. I made man number ten on the team, the minimum really for even having a team.

I had forgotten that in men's league I can play catcher, and so that is where I was installed. I didn't know how much a catcher has to throw, especially in practice where each batter is given ten good hits each.

By the end of my first practice my arm was aching. I had been moved to short stop late in the practice and on the last hit of practice I got a grounder and made the throw to first getting the runner out.

I felt good about that.

But now the practices synchronized with practices on Monday and Thursday nights, adding up to seven or eight hours of practice a week.

It sounded a bit overwhelming at first. And the first double practice was the aforementioned practice where I was placed at catcher for the first time. I was sore for two days afterward, with that first day afterward being excruciating just to get out of bed and go to work in the morning.

Out at the church league, I was moved from third to short to first, and I practiced pitching, just in case that is where I was needed.

I had been more afraid of my batting than anything, but it turns out I didn't have much to worry about in that regard. We have had three scrimmages and in those I have been at bat I believe eight times.

My first at bat went to center field and I got a double out of it, which considering I'm around three hundred pounds and not really that fast is pretty good. My second at bat, well, I stepped on home plate and fell down. I got up and jogged to first and still beat the throw. It was a good hit out to right field.

In my other at bats, one was caught in the outfield, and one was a grounder to the infield and I was thrown out at first. I've had a single and two more doubles. So I feel pretty good about my hitting.

But at the men's league, well I can't figure it out, it isn't just that there are less holes to hit the ball into, I just can't seem to hit, I drop my back shoulder too much, I pull my swing in, I just don't get it.

But my throwing arm is getting better. Better distance, better aim, just better all around. And it's less sore after practice now.

Softball is always on my mind though. I hate how many days are between Monday and Thursday, and then again between Thursday and Monday. I dream about playing softball in my sleep and wake up wishing I was at the field. I wish we were practicing five days a week.

I miss it when I'm not there. And when I am there, after I've punished my body through two practices, even though muscles ache and are sore, even though I'm tired, I always walk away smiling, wishing it was time for the next practice to start.

We go through life, and we pray, and sometimes we don't see the prayer get answered, even when it does, because maybe it wasn't answered the way we thought it would be. And sometimes we ask for direction from above, and it's given, but because it isn't necessarily the direction we were expecting, we try to go in the direction we want, and justify to ourselves that God will definitely step in if we aren't doing what we should.
And sometimes, direction will be given, even when not explicitly asked for, maybe it's a thought you've had and haven't even been asking for direction and suddenly your are shown the way.
I've never had that so clearly happen to me as tonight.
I ride around listening to my ipod, right now it's all Christian groups, there are 286 songs on it.
I've been trying to play the guitar again, and really trying this time, and actually praying for help, praying to be able to make music for God, to make a joyful noise unto the Lord. Psalm 66:1

And I've been thinking that, there should be a site out there on the internet to get chords and tab for Christian songs. There's one I go to for tab that has some Christian music, but it's pretty slim pickings. And I haven't bothered to look for one since I'm not really at a point, I didn't feel, that I would need those things yet.
So I'm listening to my ipod, the first song was Desperate by Fireflight
The second song was Lay Down My Life by Sidewalk Prophets
This song has been on there for maybe a month and, but I haven't heard it, not that surprising, as for the most part, I only get to listen in fifteen to thirty minute spurts as I drive from one place to another.
But I hear this song, and I think, I'd like to sing that one day, I'd like to play my guitar as I sing it, and I'd like to preach a message about laying down our lives for God. I don't mean that in the die for God way, but expanding on the idea of the things in our life we can give up for God. How if God wanted us to do something for him, but it would disrupt our life in a major way, like being called away from a really good job to go be a missionary with little or no money in some far land, would we lay down our life for God in that way.
And I think about this message and listen to this song twice on my way home, and when I get in I hook my ipod to these little speaker I have, and am now hearing it play for the eighth or ninth time.
But the first thing I did was search for the lyrics just so I can start singing along to it. The first time I googled it I didn't type in the bands name and it brought up some songs by different artist with similar names. And one was from a site WWW.HIGHERPRAISE.COM and I figured I would see what the lyrics of this persons song was, see if it was actually a remake.
Well what I found at that site, was the thing I had been wondering about, Christian bands, chords and tab for their songs. Sometimes you can see God show you what you need, that direction I was speaking of, even if you haven't exactly asked for it yet.

You can check the song out HERE if you're interested.

I just couldn't get done tonight, what I wanted to get done, no matter where I turned, or how much I had planned, I just couldn't seem to focus on doing several things I wanted to do before sleep, and I wanted to go to bed early so daylight saving time didn't make me tired through church in the morning. And yet here I am at 11:30, knowing that I need to be asleep.
I needed to practice my guitar some, I missed the last two nights, one because I was working on a newsletter, the other because I was at a basketball game/mini concert. I had no excuse tonight, I was home by 8:30 or so.
I also wanted to do a few pages of my new converts class worksheets, just didn't get around to it.
There was plenty of time, but I squandered it, playing on the computer, surfing from facebook to another site I frequent. So, you may be wondering, what pearls of wisdom was I dispersing that distracted me from being able to do the more important task of the night, what in depth conversation did I become part of? Well, none, maybe posted three times in three hours, where does the time slip away?
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Well, I decided to go to sleep, and now it is Sunday night.
And no, I didn't get any guitar practice in today, but I'll get back on it tomorrow, and my exercise program. But to my original point, why is it so easy to just let time get away and the important things fall by the wayside as we focus on less important things?
Why does following through seem so hard to grasp these days? And how do we find the necessary strength to adhere to the plans we have made.
I started this blog because I had a lot of things I wanted to say, but if you look at my previous post history you'll see how few post I've posted, maybe two a month after the initial four the first month. It isn't lack of ideas that have kept me from posting, I have had lots more ideas than I've posted, little notes written on scraps of paper that I've saved to write about later, and never seemed to find the time to get them done.
And here I am today thinking about starting another blog to focus fully on a new direction and project in my life. And I'm going to do it, I have a name in mind, and hopefully no one out there is using it yet. I just need to learn to focus on what is important, the things that drive me, the things I want to do for the Lord. He didn't give me the gifts he did for me to squander them, and I plan to use them fully from this day forward. I have had it impressed upon me this weekend how important it is to serve now because one day I will be looking back at my life, and I will feel regret for the times I could have been serving the Lord, but wasn't.

I have felt for some time now, not really since the beginning, but close, I’ve felt that something big was going to happen, that I was supposed to do something for God, and I’ve been wondering what it is.
I’m going to Atlantafest this summer, and I have a feeling that everything will become clear that week. That all my growth, the learning I’ve been doing, will all come to a head at that moment in time, and whether all is revealed to me or not, I will walk away with a complete understanding of what I am supposed to be doing.
I feel like I get glimpses of it now, little nudges in one direction or another, and I think I can start to see shapes through the haze of uncertainty, and I wonder, is that it, is that what I’m supposed to be doing, and the curtain will be closed back upon the scene and a voice will tell me, not yet, but soon you will be ready.
Part of why I want to go to Atlantafest is the music. I’ve always loved music, all kinds. But these are Christian artist, but that doesn’t pigeon hole them into one specific genre.
There are some rock bands, one that has a sound reminiscent of AFI, a pop sounding female vocalist, hip hop performer. Like I said different genres. I’m making a short list of the ones I want to see, and once I know the performance schedules, well if I have to cut some out, I’ll decide then which ones it’ll be.
Then there are the speakers, Nick Vujicic, you may have seen him on youtube or facebook before, he’s a motivational speaker with no arms or legs. And Matt Pitt, a preacher like you’ve probably never seen before. Google Matt Pitt and the basement and check out his story.
But as excited as I am for those things, I am equally, if not more excited about the Christian living seminars and the prayer path. Check it all out at their website: http://www.atlantafest.com/
I feel like, for me at least, the prayer path will truly be a spiritual awakening moment.
But to get back to my main point of interest, music, well not exactly music, but it leads to my point of interest.
I love music, and here lately I’ve had some songs screaming a message at me.
Some of which are “Keep Quiet” by Barlow Girl, “Million Voices” again by Barlow Girl, and “Lost Get Found” by Nicole Britt
And what I hear from these songs is this, tell someone about Jesus Christ and salvation, and how important it is to not be silent when given this opportunity. And this has really been building as a burden in me, because more and more it seems I see those lost out there moving about, not caring that they are lost.
And at the same time I see other Christians react in this way to those people when they see them, “Look at that guy, he’s going to hell the way he’s living, shacked up with his girlfriend, ain’t never gonna get right,” and in the next breath start talking about what went on at work that week.
You just looked at a person, and judged that they are going to hell, and even though you have salvation in you, the greatest gift ever, a gift that it’s okay to re-gift, you’re going to ignore a person going to hell in your judgment, who just walked by you.
Why would you not share the love of Jesus Christ with that person, and I’m sorry, why would you open with telling them they’re going to hell, because really, you don’t know that, you are assuming it. Maybe I’m wrong but I thought the Bible said to spread the gospel, not to run around telling every lost person they are going to hell.
When you open with that, people shut their mind and ears to anything you have to say afterward because they know you’ve already made up your mind about them. But when you start by asking them simple things like “who is Jesus to you” or even just asking if they’ve ever heard of Jesus Christ, and inviting them to church.
And don’t get hung up on the fact that they might wear baggy pants, or a sideways ball cap, or whatever, that’s your own vanity about what the proper way to dress is distracting you from what your purpose in speaking to this lost soul should be, helping move them down the path that leads to salvation.
We sometimes seem to forget that some of the disciples were just stinky old fishermen when Jesus first encountered them, but when he left boy, whoo! They were fishers of men!

That's not all I want to say about this, but just feels like the right point for me to stop this part of the story.

ETA: This was actually written around 7:40 Friday night, I'm only just now posting it cause I've been a bit lazy.

It's snowing here, all of about two inches so far, that also equals the number of times I have fallen.

Now don't use my medic alert bracelet, I did get back up, that's how I'm typing this now.

Anyway, the first fall, I saw a kids sled and picked it up, figured I'd give it a go, you know, run dive, slide. It's one of those plastic ones, I don't know if they have different names in other parts of the country, but round here, a sled is a sled is a sled.

Now how many people misread that as salad salad salad?

So I took two half lumbering, slightly jaunty steps towards a slight slope of a hill, but before I could take flight, well I took flight as I watched my feet come up above my face.

I turned in mid air so that instead of landing on my amply padded backside, I could land safe and secure with my keys between my leg and the ground, digging oh so carefully into the fleshy parts of me.

I laughed it off, cause I love snow, it's the greatest thing on the planet, yes even better than those two nice things all the pretty ladies have, you know arms, cause sorry if I offend, I'm just not into amputees, but I really dig a girl with two really nice arms.

But I digress as I all too often do.

Does anyone else use words that they aren't really sure of the meaning of, but they sound like they would fit where you put them, I do that sometimes, so if digress means an egress with a copy of readers digest or something like that, then I've totally screwed up already.

Again back to the story, I've always been bad about chasing rabbits in the middle of stories, no that isn't how I fell the second time, I was just walking along, and boom, up come my feet again, I do the midair triple axel again, really, if this were an Olympic <---(spell check just told me that Olympic was capitalized, I didn't know that, hmmm) sport, I would excel in it.

So down I came once again, not on my overly ample gluteus maximus but onto my keys between my leg and the ground.

I now have two key shaped marks, one in each leg as I switched sides after the first fall because that side was getting irritated by the swishing of the keys in my pocket.

So, is there a moral to this story, why yes it is, it is to say that I love snow, it is my favorite thing in the whole wide world, it's more awesome than Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. I love how it's so white that it absorbs so much light that it makes the sky look darker when it's falling because your eyes just focus on it.

I love how you can go out at night without a light and be able to see everything because of how it draws in every bit of available light and shines in the night like a giant spotlight on everything.

I also like, that unlike ice, you know, when you fall on ice, it's hard, it doesn't give, it hurts. Snow on the other hand, well, when you fall on snow, it's like falling on marshmallows. It's truly the greatest thing ever, and that's why I love snow.

Not that you were asking or anything, but there you go.

Toodles, Happy Weekend.

So I see some talk of karma from time to time, karma's gonna get this person or that person. I don't buy it, and I'll tell you why.

See I'm a pretty nice guy, and yet, that didn't stop my wife of five years from running off with another man, one who is 16 years older than her to boot, within a month of meeting him for the first time. So, if karma is real, we have to assume that I did something to warrant this being done to me. I have searched and searched and have yet to find anything remotely bad enough to warrant this cosmic payback to me.

And what of our son. He rarely gets to see me, misses meals, and is struggling something terrible, and for what, what has he done in his all to short life to warrant the universe doing this to him.

And maybe it's not this life, if you believe in such things, maybe I did something in a previous life, I thought that meant you just became something terrible in this life, like a dung beetle, forced to push balls of crap around your whole life.

But if I'm being punished now, for something I did in another life, isn't that like punishing your oldest child because your youngest stole a cookie?

If karma is about writing wrongs in the universe, and I beat up an old man in another life, then shouldn't I be unjustly incarcerated in this life for a crime I didn't commit?

That's what doesn't make sense to me, if karma is so powerful that it can right wrongs across different lives, how come it doesn't just stop the bad things from happening in the first place? Why not make the murderer fall dead of a heart attack right before he intends to commit his murder?

Why continue this cycle of payback in life after life, rather than just thwarting the bad things to begin with. If karma is so powerful as to change the fates of people, how come it can't do that one thing, and have everything settled at once, peace and tranquility forever?

Karma doesn't, because it isn't there.

That guy would never come to church. That’s what some of us think when we are trying to witness, basing our decision to witness to a person on their choice of clothes, or the music they listen to.
We can easily get trapped into the mindset of only a certain type of person is reachable and so we should focus our efforts on that person. And we ignore the person who has probably heard the gospel the least out of the two and in my opinion is more in need of hearing it.
Now I think we are all as in need of salvation as the next man, but there are those out there who have never been to church, that know only one way of living, and if we are to follow in the tradition of the great commission of reaching all nations with the gospel, then maybe we need to stop taking for granted that all in America, who can freely worship, should be confined to either finding faith on their own, or not.
So you weren’t called to be a missionary in Africa, or Australia, or some other far off land. Well I’m here to tell you that you can be a missionary in America. There are lost in this country that needs to hear the word of God, of the saving grace of Jesus Christ, as much as any person in the far reaches of the earth.
And we walk past them every day. Sometimes we look through them as if they aren’t there.
Why?
God reached down and pulled you up into his arms and gave you comfort when none other could, he gave you salvation, the greatest gift ever given, and all it would take is a few minutes to pass on that gift to someone else, someone who may be trapped in their own world of darkness, looking for a light to lead them out of it.
Someone has to be that light bearer for them. Someone has to help them find that path.
If you were walking around, angry at the world, not for what the world had done to you, but because you felt the world didn’t care about you, how much would it mean to you for someone to stop you and say, “I do care about you, and this is why.” And just tell them what has been done for you, about God’s love and his sacrifice of his son for us.
I’ve been there, I was in a church where I didn’t feel that the love of God was talked about, everyone caught up in the world of me, me, me.
As Christians, we can’t get caught up in this thinking, for we might miss the opportunity to help bring someone closer to the Lord.
So how do you know who to give the Gospel to?
The easy answer is everyone. There is no one out there that doesn’t need to hear the Gospel. Whether they have salvation or not, it never hurts to talk about God’s love. You never know who will hear your conversation and make them want to know more themselves.
And when you are wondering if you should talk to a person about it or not, don’t start listing reasons it would be a waste of time, things like their clothes or music, but rather think of all the reasons to tell them, God’s love for us, the gift of salvation and eternal life, a life where your burdens don’t seem so bad because you have seen how bad things could have been, you have seen where your life might be but for the intervening hand of God.
And maybe, just maybe, you will start that person on a path of salvation, because you will have shown them someone cares, and there is another way.
So go out today, and each day after and be a 24/7 Christian. Be a missionary in America. Let every day, every moment, every person you meet, be an opportunity to tell someone about God, Jesus Christ and salvation.
And if you are afraid, or feel like you don’t know how to talk to people, don’t know how to open up and give them the message for what God has done for you, just pray, ask God for the courage to open your mouth when the weight of the world is telling you to keep it closed. Ask him to give you the strength needed to overcome your fears.