Hey Dad, Wanna Have a Catch?
On Baseball and the Grace that Shows Up in a Backyard
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.
Most of us don't see it coming. You're sitting across from your mom or dad at the kitchen table, or riding somewhere together with the radio doing most of the talking, or just watching them move through a room they've lived in for years — and something catches you. Maybe it's the way they reached for the counter without thinking about it. Maybe it's a name that took a little longer to find than it used to. Maybe it's nothing you could even point to, just a quiet feeling that settles in your chest somewhere between dinner and dessert. And most of us do the same thing with that feeling. We set it aside. We let the moment pass. We tell ourselves there's still time, that today is a good day, that bringing it up would just make things heavy when they don't need to be. But that feeling doesn't really go away, does it. It just waits. And somewhere underneath the waiting, love is already asking the question you haven't figured out how to say yet. Most of us keep putting it off for reasons that make complete sense when you're living inside them. We don't want to seem like we're rushing anything, or that we've already started thinking about what comes after. So we stay quiet because quiet feels kinder, even when it isn't. We tell ourselves they've earned the right to not have to think about hard things, that they're doing fine and we should just let them be fine. But here's something I've learned from years of sitting with families in the middle of their hardest moments. Most parents have already thought about it. Many of them have been waiting for someone to open the door. They just didn't want to be the one to bring it up and worry you, so they've been carrying it quietly the same way you have, each of you waiting for the other one to go first. And then there's the reason most of us admit last, if we admit it at all. We don't want to have the conversation because having it means we have to look directly at something we've been keeping in the corner of the room. Starting the conversation makes it real in a way that the quiet feeling in your chest at the kitchen table does not. So the conversation waits. And if we're honest, we're not entirely sure which one is doing the waiting — the love or the fear. Most of the time they're sitting in the same chair. I've been in rooms on both sides of this conversation. Rooms where it happened in time, and rooms where it didn't. When it didn't, grief arrives with a companion nobody invited. The casseroles come, the flowers arrive, the people fill the house — and somewhere in the middle of all of it someone has to start asking questions that feel impossibly practical for a moment that is so deeply human. Is there anything in place? Where is the paperwork? What did they want? Those questions don't come from greed or impatience. They come from love trying to keep moving when it doesn't know what to do with itself. But they are heavy questions to carry in an already heavy room. When it did happen in time, something is different. Grief is still there — love always makes it heavy, and nothing changes that. But there is a little more breathing room. A little more space to just be sad without also having to be frantic. I have watched families in those rooms too, and what I notice is not the absence of pain but the absence of panic. Someone thought ahead. Someone had the conversation. And now, in the hardest moment, that quiet act of love is still speaking. The difference between those two rooms is almost always that hard conversations either happened or they didn't. The conversation that wasn't easy to begin actually was begun, and decisions, desires, and wishes were shared. So if you've been carrying that quiet feeling around, the one that showed up at the kitchen table or in the car or just watching your parent move through a room — maybe it's time to stop waiting for the perfect moment, because the perfect moment is not coming. What is coming, eventually, is the moment when the conversation can no longer happen at all. You don't have to have all the answers before you begin. You don't need a folder full of documents or a checklist or a plan already in place. You just need a way in. And sometimes the simplest way in is also the most honest one. Something like: I've been thinking about you, and I want to make sure we've talked about some things while we have the chance. Not because I'm worried, but because I love you and I want to get this right. That's enough to open the door. The rest of the conversation will find its own way. And if somewhere along the way you'd like some help thinking through the practical side of things — the financial piece that love sometimes needs in order to do its job — I'm always here for that conversation too. No pressure. No script. Just two people talking about taking care of the ones we love while we still can. Because here's what I know after years of standing with families in their hardest moments. The conversation you're afraid to start is very often the one your parent has been hoping someone would begin. Love just needed one of you to go first.
I told you about the nights, but nobody really warns you about the mornings. And the more I think about it, the more I suspect the morning might actually be the harder of the two. At night, at least, you know what is coming. You learn that the dark has teeth, that the quiet begins to grow loud somewhere around two in the morning, and that the other side of the bed will be cold in a way that has nothing to do with temperature. Night is difficult, but in a strange way it is also predictable. After a while you begin to recognize its rhythms, and you can brace yourself for it. Morning is different. Morning sneaks up on you. It arrives in that fragile space between sleep and waking, that thin moment when your mind has not quite caught up with your life yet. For just a moment, maybe half a moment, you forget. And then you remember. That remembering, every single morning, carries its own kind of loss. It is a small grief inside the larger one, like being told the news again, quietly and without ceremony, just long enough to knock the wind out of you before the day has even properly begun. Nobody warns you about that moment, the brief forgetting followed by the sudden remembering. It might last only ten seconds, but it can feel like the loneliest ten seconds of the whole day. Eventually you get up anyway, because what else is there to do. And once you do, you begin to notice that morning has its own geography of grief. The coffee pot is usually the first place it appears. If you spent years sharing life with someone, the coffee pot seems to know the story before you do. It is still set for two. You may find yourself reaching automatically for two mugs before your hand stops in midair. Or you make a full pot because that is what you have always done, and now half of it goes cold on the counter. The bathroom carries its own quiet ambush. His razor still rests on the shelf. Her robe still hangs on the hook. You have not moved them yet, partly because moving them feels like a decision you are not ready to make, and partly because leaving them there allows you to pretend, just for another day, that nothing has changed. The problem, of course, is that leaving them there means you see them every single morning. There is no good option, only the one you can manage today. The chair at the kitchen table that nobody sits in anymore. The second toothbrush. The voicemail you have not deleted because it still carries her voice, and you are not ready for that silence yet. Morning is full of objects that used to mean nothing and now mean everything. Over time they begin to feel like something else entirely. Monuments, maybe. Small ones. Quiet ones. Devastating ones. Here is something else about morning that takes a while to notice. The world does not pause for it. At first that can feel almost cruel. The birds outside the window continue singing as if nothing has changed. The neighbor pulls out of the driveway at the same time he always does. The mail still arrives in the afternoon. Someone down the street is mowing the lawn, and for a moment you want to step outside and ask how it is possible that ordinary life is still happening. Life just keeps moving. The audacity of it can feel almost offensive. And yet, after standing at enough gravesides and sitting with enough families during the early days of their loss, I have begun to notice something about mornings. Morning is often where the story quietly begins to turn. Not because the grief has disappeared. It has not. Not because the pain suddenly lifts with the rising sun. It does not, at least not for a long time. But morning carries a kind of stubbornness that night does not have. A quiet persistence that shows up whether you invited it or not. There is a story in the Gospel of John that has always stayed with me. Mary goes to the tomb at dawn. Not midday when the sun is high, and not later in the afternoon when the world might feel a little less fragile. She goes at dawn, in that earliest and most uncertain light, when it would have been easier and perhaps more sensible to stay home. But she goes anyway, carrying her grief like something she cannot set down. And it is there, in that dim morning light, that she discovers the story is not finished. That moment did not erase any of it — the tomb was real, the death was real, the grief was real — but morning held something she could not have imagined while the night was still heavy around her. I am not going to paper over anyone’s grief with a resurrection metaphor. Your loss is real. The empty chair is real. The cold coffee is real. But I do believe that morning carries something within it. It carries a stubbornness and with that, a quiet insistence that the story is still being written. Maybe that is what grace looks like in the early days of loss. Not comfort exactly and not answers. Certainly not the feeling that everything is suddenly okay, because everything is not okay and pretending otherwise helps no one. Sometimes grace simply looks like morning. Morning arriving again, uninvited and persistent, refusing to not show up. The coffee pot still working. The birds outside the window completely unaware of your pain. The light coming through the same window it always has, landing on the floor in the same place as yesterday, as if it has not yet heard the news. At first that can feel like cruelty. But maybe it is not. Maybe it is the world quietly insisting that there is still a day here. And that day, however fragile it feels, still belongs to you. You do not have to be okay in the morning. Not yet. Maybe not for a long time. You are allowed to sit with the second mug still resting on the counter. You are allowed to let the coffee grow cold. You are allowed to stay in the chair by the window longer than is practical, watching the neighbor mow his lawn and feeling the strange distance between his world and yours. You are allowed to let morning be hard. But here is something I have learned from watching people carry this weight. Morning keeps coming back. Every single day it arrives without asking permission and without checking whether you feel ready for it. It simply appears again, faithful in a way that almost feels stubborn. And somewhere inside that stubborn return there is a kind of grace. Not the grace that fixes things, but the grace that stays. The grace that quietly says, I know you did not sleep well. I know you forgot for a moment and then remembered. I know the coffee pot broke your heart again this morning. Here is a little more light anyway. The Unlikely Altar this time might simply be the window, the same window the light comes through every morning, landing in the same place on the floor. It does not know your grief. It cannot fix your grief. But it shows up anyway. And maybe, just for today, that small and stubborn light is enough to help you begin again.