Well, it seems all of our friends in North Texas have weathered the tornadoes just fine. The guy who used to live next door works for the shipping company that made the news, though. All those eighteen-wheelers that were flying around through the sky were owned by the company he drives trucks for. Sounds like the church Josh and I used to work for survived as well, but one of those tornadoes hit really close by. I heard that nobody even got hurt. That's kind of miracle in itself. Stuff is just stuff, after all. I recall learning that lesson, oh, about three and a half years ago now. Good thing about hurricanes, though. At least we knew Ike was coming and were able to get out of town. Those tornadoes scare me. They can pop up anytime without much warning.
I've been helping a little bit with coaching Jachin's baseball team. They bat against one of those monster machines that are supposed to throw nothing but strikes. The idea I guess is to teach them to hit without fear of being hit. Good concept. Except when it doesn't work. Not that anyone got hit by a pitch last night. That would have been a bit too much. The problem we had was more with the venue than with the equipment.
The game was held at a field in LaMarque. Interesting in itself, since it was two Hitchcock teams playing. When we arrived I thought we would be pleasantly surprised. From the outside the field looked great. Spectator seating rimmed the area behind the catcher from dugout to dugout, and even included a special enclosed area for the official scorekeeper and scoreboard operator. Not that we had a scorekeeper or scoreboard operator. They had a very nice building to house the bathrooms. But the doors were locked. The field was in terrible condition. The pitching mound was, for want of a better term, lumpy. Charlie Brown's is in better condition than this one, and he's in the funny papers. There were holes all over the infield and outfield. Not to mention the proliferation of fire ant beds. There was no pitching machine anywhere to be found. One finally showed up, and the coaches had to put it together. The lumpy mound, however, prevented it from throwing accurate pitches. The coaches were constantly adjusting it, and the poor kids were facing balls thrown well over their heads or far outside. I sure heard a lot of grumbling and complaining from the coach of the other team. He was firing off text after text from the first base coaching box to league officials.
I think part of the reason he was so aggressive in his complaint-registering was because our guys were actually doing well. This was the team that we played last week, and they stopped the game because of the ten run mercy rule. Not so much yesterday, though. They still beat us, but the final score was only 9-7. That's a huge improvement. And they even made a defensive position change to ensure that we wouldn't actually win the game. Way to go, Hitchcock Rangers.
Jachin did pretty well. He played catcher the whole game. He led off in the batting order and got a few hits. But he seemed very tired. Kel finally told me that he had been to a party before the game and grubbed out on candy. Then he didn't eat any supper because he was too full. Guess when the sugar high departed he was just too weak to carry on. Lesson learned? Probably not. Candy is a pretty difficult temptation to overcome for a seven year old. Come to think of it, I guess there is a "candy" that's pretty difficult to overcome no matter how old you are.
1 Peter 2:4-5 says, "As you come to him, the living Stone — rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him— you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ."
Father, give us candy-lovers some help in our struggle to overcome. Amen.
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