it’s really not about baseball
Friday morning sun lightly peeks around the edges of the curtains. I sit snug in the corner of the sofa early feasting on God, and Adam paces the downstairs rooms before school, his feet padding out a metronome count—this this this this THIS—against the floor. This this this this THIS, this this this this THIS, this this this this THIS—It is the rhythm of a week’s striving, maybe, zinging through Adam’s body and then out again through his feet. It is the sound, it seems, of my planner, if those lists of blessing and responsibility could be translated into a single sound.
I pause, pondering hope, my finger resting on a snatch of a psalm, the singer singing to God, all my hope is in you.
Kevin, carrying our coffee mugs into the kitchen for a refill, pauses to talk to Adam about their father-son plan to go to a baseball game and there also see the Friday night fireworks. I imagine multicolored stars, popping as they burst, sparking and fizzing through the dark of night above a baseball diamond, brighter than the stadium lights lighting the playing field.
You are light dawning, light exploding, the light the darkness cannot overcome.
All my hope is in you.
The words come, a prayer erupting.
“You excited for baseball?” Kevin says, knowing the answer will be yes, because when has Adam not been excited about baseball?
I do not yet know that the question, in so much as it is really a relational one—Do you actually anticipate me?—is also for me. But here I am, listening.
When there’s a game plan, Adam rehearses it, anticipates it, expects it, checking and rechecking my planner, and the Google calendar on every phone. In fact, we’ve all come to know there’s no erasing a game plan Adam has anticipated, upon which he has fixed his attention.
Above our now filled mugs in Kevin’s hands, steam curls.
From where I sit, I can see Adam’s face, the knot that appears in the bridge between his eyes, that somehow, somewhere in his mind, he’s tripping over the question. Maybe, like I do at first, he thinks this inquiry is about scheduling—the plans–more than it is about a relationship.
Meanwhile, word nerd digging into the fertile soil of the text, I see that in the Biblical poetry the word translated hope carries the idea of expectation, not just some nice, comforting idea flickering happily in the background of the mind, but an active Adam-style anticipation, always relative, always watching, always renewing, always holding my attention. Such a thing takes intention, that’s what I’m thinking at first, shifting in my seat, muscle-stiff and sore, feeling the weekly weary setting in before the weekend. But really, such a thing takes abiding love. So, the songwriter, pained by his own weary want but knowing this, offers a sacrifice to God, says, you are my every expectation. I have decided to fix my eyes on you, to hope, actively, in you, to keep returning to you. Everything, always relative to you. Whatever there is for me, it will come in the context of you.
What would it be, I’m asking God, to truly wait on you that way?
“No?” Adam says, but quietly, tentatively, brow furrowed serious, and Kevin and I both come awake with surprise, because for Adam, baseball represents joy.
This, this, this, this, THIS.
His pacing, feet voicing that sound, the connection of clauses, resumes, through the living room, around the stairs, through the front room, the kitchen, and back.
This, his feet say, refusing to be still, and to what, I’m wondering, does my Autistic, dis-connecting young man intend to connect, if not to his father? Is he only pacing, or is he going somewhere? To someone? Because there is always, for the relational being, some kind of relationship.
Baseball, maybe for its slow, predictable rhythms, its music, seems to offer Adam some relief, at least for a little while, from the sensory overload of his everyday life, and most of the time, he’d rather go see some baseball than do just about anything else. Sitting around a baseball diamond, he stills, and finally unhindered, connects to us, and that, though I don’t think he knows it, is the most important part.
You could think of baseball as a Sabbath unique to Adam, a defiant exercise of his freedom.
But as I said, Adam doesn’t understand, not entirely. He sees, but through the muddled glass, thinking all this, Kevin stopping in the kitchen to ask, is about baseball, in the way that we human beings can believe the invitation to salvation is a question about heaven.
Meanwhile, I am remembering the way that I, stilled in Sabbath from all my wandering to and fro, finally unhindered by so many distractions assailing my attention, connect to God. I am remembering that the relationship, all my hope rooted there, is the most important part.
From my corner now, I watch Adam catch sight of his dad still standing in the kitchen; watch him pause again mid-pace, interrupted; watch him fingering the hem of his white t-shirt, a map of the city sketched out in thick black lines across his chest.
Watching the two of them, I see how all my going only finally slows when I have eyes to see my Father looking with love upon me.
“Wait, what?” Kevin asks, incredulous. “You’re not excited for baseball?”
Wait, what—wait to re-connect with what, or really, I’m knowing Kevin means, with whom.
This opportunity, the baseball and fireworks, Kevin planned not just for himself but for Adam, because of what it means for Adam to be still, to rest from overstimulation, to enjoy reconnecting with his dad.
Sabbath practice never has been this thing I do for God, but is more accurately a thing He does in me, for me, because I need Him. I can get caught up in the details, but it’s not really about the occasion of Sabbath, exactly the when, the how, so much as it is about re-orienting always to hope in this union with God.
“No?” Adam says again, and I hear the question, the confusion, tugging up at the end of word.
Kevin hears it too, so good father reaches to clarify.
“You don’t want to go to the baseball game? To see some fireworks?”
“No?”
And suddenly I hear the sometimes-hesitant sound of my own hitching hope, tripping over that tiny word all. When I’m honest with myself, I hear how much like my son I really sound, when I try to echo the psalmist’s prayer.
All my hope is in you? Every expectation, you? But what about this this this this THIS?
I have all these expectations, see, about the day, in truth, the life.
Adam stops, caught by Kevin’s gaze, but I can see, written in Adam’s watchful eyes, the pull of the pace. He feels a calling from the floor, that striving zing pushing, pressing at his feet.
“After school? Baseball, after school?” I interject, thinking about what usually arrests my hoping in God, what blocks my active expectation to just be with Him, and isn’t it my mind fixed on this, what I feel I must attend to before I can fully attend to that?
It’s easy to get confused, to feel somehow that the things I do for God somehow come ahead of being with Him. I can relegate my watchfulness of Him, my remembering and returning to revisit Him, my excitement for Him, to an item on a schedule instead of understanding that always-Sabbath hoping in Him, only in Him, is the only viable context for all of this this this this THIS.
Or, in better, less equivocal terms, Jesus said, “If someone remains in me and I in them, they will bear much fruit, but apart from me, you can do nothing.”
All my hope is in you, Lord.
So, God is the home to all my pacing, my place of active rest, where I can expect to live through Him. Sabbath, then, is about getting away from my routine to re-calibrate my life for working from home. Sabbath is that prayer—all my hope is in you, lived.
“No, I don’t mean baseball right this minute,” Kevin says to Adam, patient with Adam’s confusion, with Adam’s limited view. “I mean baseball later, after school, tonight. Do you want to go to baseball with me tonight, or no, no baseball?”
“Yes, yes baseball,” Adam says at last, confusion starting to clear, his chin bobbing a decisive nod.
“Yes baseball?”
“Yes, yes baseball. Yes baseball.”
It’s locational, hope, not situational or circumstantial. It’s not really a thing to put on a schedule.
Whatever I do arises out of who I am in Him, and what I can always expect is to remain in Him, no matter what happens.
It isn’t that Adam will go to school, come home, eat dinner, and then go watch baseball, these the slotted lines in some list, but that out of Adam’s unwavering hope, his active expectation of an enduring, loving, baseball-together-promising relationship with his dad, from that context, he goes to school, returns home, finds nourishment, and discovers joy.
All my hope is in you.
The Father smiles, gentle, understanding Child in ways the child cannot understand him, and Child finds the courage to go on, expectation shifted by this whole exchange not merely to the baseball game and the fireworks, but to the relationship from which everything else will, undoubtedly, unfold as it should.
So, Child resumes, more purposefully this time, bouncing for anticipated joy on those boney, callused, well-traveled feet, this this this this THIS.
