I Should Have

September 28, 2022

We’re into the last week of the Major League Baseball season. Several teams are still unsure if they will make the playoffs. It’s fun to keep up with! Beyond that, the number of wins a team has can make a big difference in who they will face first in the playoffs.

With all their skill and effort, though, eastern teams must now deal with an unexpected factor. A hurricane looms, and will be heading up the coast this weekend. Games may be shortened because of rain, or a game called off may be played the next day as part of a “double header.”

Sound familiar? In your life, at times you’ve made careful preparations, applied your abilities skillfully, but still disaster threatens to upend everything. Trouble can surprise us. How do we react?

One thing we need to consider first is whether we’ve brought this misfortune on ourselves. The baseball teams that fall one win short might think back to games they lost in April, when insufficient effort was given. The playoffs seemed so far away!

Apply that to your spiritual life. God is the help we’ve got to stay attached to. Jesus said in John 15:4, “Remain in me, and I will remain in you. Just as no branch can bear fruit by itself, unless it remains in the vine, neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.”

What if, with all our effort, we still lose? For the baseball player, he will know that his family still loves him, he’s still making a great salary, and fans won’t forget his past accomplishments. As the Bible says it in Psalm 30:5, “Weeping may stay the night, but joy comes in the morning.”

Trouble won’t last. A life built on a relationship with God can withstand the storms.