A Bingo Card Filled with Beginnings

Every year, the week of Opening Day , I watch the movie, Field of Dreams . It's a ritual and it is pretty non-negotiable. And because I am going to cry, I watch it alone. When I say cry, I am not talking about some polite tear or two. I am talking about the kind of crying that sneaks up on you even though you know exactly what's coming — because you've seen it more times than you can count and it wrecks you every single time. You probably know the ending. Ray Kinsella, standing in a cornfield in Iowa, realizes the young ballplayer who has walked out of the corn is his father — his father as a young man, before life got complicated, before things went wrong. And after everything — after all the wondering and the waiting and the not knowing — Ray looks at him and says, voice barely holding together: "Hey Dad... wanna have a catch?" I lose it every time -- I mean every single time. Because I know that question. I have carried it my whole life. I just never had anywhere to put it. My father's name was Larry. He left when I was very young — so young that I have no memory of him. I don’t remember his voice or his face or the smell of him or his laugh. I mean he was there (I guess), and then he wasn't, like a foul ball that disappears into the stands and doesn't come back. You can't grieve what you don't understand. And for a long time I didn't understand what was missing. I just knew something was. Baseball found me somewhere in that emptiness. I can't explain it exactly — the game just had a steadiness to it that nothing else did. Maybe it was the long season; the fact there was always another game the next day. Or maybe it is the way failure is built right into the game's DNA, and you're considered great if you succeed three times out of ten. There was grace in that. There was room in that for a kid who was still figuring out what he was made of without a father around to tell him. You know, I never had a catch with Larry. Not once. He was gone before that could happen, and there was no cornfield waiting for us, no magic that could bring him back across the years to stand in my backyard on a summer evening and throw me the ball. For a long time I thought that was simply the wound I would carry. The unanswered question. The catch that never happened. And maybe it is. Some absences don't fill — they just become something you learn to live alongside, like a room in your house you don't go into very often but never quite forget is there. I've written about THE glove before — Larry’s glove . ( Some of you know this story. ) But Opening Day has me reaching for it again, the way you reach for certain things when the season turns. It’s a worn left-handed glove that I found years ago in a box among papers and old certificates — the only thing he left behind besides the questions. It sits in my office now. I see it every single day. It never fit right. It never could — he was a southpaw and I never knew that about him until I slipped my hand inside and felt the wrongness of it. A left-handed glove for a right-handed boy whose father never stayed long enough to find out which hand he threw with. That glove is my Unlikely Altar . The one I didn't choose and can't seem to put away. The one that sits there quietly every morning when I come in to write, or get on the phones, holding all the questions I never got to ask, reminding me of the catch that never happened. But then one afternoon, not so long ago, something happened. I was in the backyard with one of my adult sons. We grabbed gloves and I tossed him a ball. He threw it back. And just like that, without any ceremony or swelling music or ghosts emerging from the corn, we were having a catch. No soundtrack. No magic. Just a dad and his kid, the ball moving back and forth between them in the late afternoon light. That backyard didn't give me my dad. It didn't fix the absence or answer the question I've been carrying since before I knew I was carrying it. But it did something else. It rewrote the ending. It said the story that started with a father who left doesn't have to end there. That I get to choose something different. The catch I never had with Larry became the catch I get to have with my boys. And somewhere in that exchange — the ball leaving my hand, crossing the space between us, landing safe in his glove — I felt something I can only call grace. Grace found in reconciliation. Not with the man I never knew, but with the story itself. With the fact that it didn't break me. With the fact that I'm here, throwing the ball, showing up. Maybe that is why I love Opening Day so much. It is like the Resurrection itself. It gives us the chance to rewrite our story . You see, on Opening Day every single team is in first place. There are no losers yet and no broken hearts. No October collapses to recover from. Just thirty ball clubs and thirty sets of fans walking back in through the gates believing — fully, without reservation — that this is the year. The slate is wiped clean, the thing you were sure was finished turning out to not be finished at all. Hope springs eternal, they say — and they've been saying it for years because it keeps being true. Every Opening Day, the whole beautiful impossible season begins again. It is all about grace and second chances. But more than that, it is like a right-handed boy who spent a lifetime reaching for a catch he thought he'd never have — and then one ordinary afternoon, in a backyard with his son, discovered he already had everything he'd been looking for. Happy Opening Day. Go find someone to have a catch with. I have a feeling somebody out there needs it as much as you do.

I wasn't expecting it, but then again the best moments rarely announce themselves. I posted something on Facebook and, Atticus, one of my favorite young people from my years doing youth ministry in College Station left a comment that made me think. He called his generation the Sandwich Generation — squeezed from both ends, caring for aging parents while still raising their own families — and something that stayed with me long after I put my phone down. I've known this kid since he was a teenager, back in those College Station days when youth ministry meant late nights, bad pizza, and conversations that somehow managed to be both ridiculous and surprisingly deep all at the same time. He was one of those guys you just knew was going to turn out well. And now here he is, grown, living in the middle of exactly the kind of season that doesn't show up on anyone's life plan. Caring for parents who need more than they used to. Raising his own family while trying to hold both ends of the rope without letting either one slip. I looked at his comment for a long time. Not because it surprised me that life had brought him here, but because it reminded me that the hard seasons find everyone eventually. The S andwich Generation doesn't get talked about enough, and when it does it usually gets reduced to logistics. The doctor's appointments and the school pickups. The phone calls from a parent that come at inconvenient times and the homework that still needs checking after a long day. The calendar that never quite has enough room for everything that needs to fit inside it. But the logistics are actually the easier part. So what is the hard part? It's the emotional weight of standing in the middle of two kinds of love at the same time. The love that looks backward toward the people who raised you, watching them need you in ways that feel unfamiliar and perhaps a bit frightening. And the love that looks forward toward the people you are raising, trying to give them enough of you when you are not always sure how much you have left. Both of those loves are real and they are both sometimes demanding. Most days you are doing your best to honor both of them without dropping either one, which is its own kind of exhausting that is very hard to explain to someone who has never stood exactly where you are standing. And here is what I have learned from watching people carry this particular weight. The squeezing feeling — that sense of being needed from both directions at once — is not a sign that something has gone wrong in your life. It is actually a sign of something that has gone very right. You are exhausted because you love people who are worth being exhausted for. The parent who needs more of you than they used to is the same person who showed up for you before you knew enough to be grateful for it. The kids who need more of you than you sometimes feel like you have are the same people who will one day carry your story forward into a world you will never see. The sandwich is not a burden that landed on you by accident. It is the shape that love takes in the middle of a life well lived. And maybe that is the Unlikely Altar hiding in plain sight. Not in a sanctuary or a quiet moment of prayer, though those matter too. But right there in the middle of the calendar that has too much in it. Right there in the phone call from your parent that came at an inconvenient time. Right there in the homework that still needs checking at the end of a long day. Grace has a way of showing up exactly where love is working hardest . And you, standing in the middle of all of it, are standing on holy ground whether it feels that way or not.