Life plays hardball: The pitches come fast, high and inside, and though we try our best to hit them, there occasionally comes a pitch too high, too inside…and it nails us.  It smarts, and there’s a deep bruise left behind.  Sometimes, we get hit so hard, we find ourselves dropping to the ground.

When you play hardball, there’s always the risk of getting hit, getting hurt, being dropped where we stand.   Things like:

1.  Broken Relationships

2.   Prolonged Illness and death

3.   Failure—when we go down in flames no matter how hard we try--at work, in public, etc.

There are others to be sure, but these will the particular “hits” we will examine today and the next two weeks.

I imagine nearly every one of us has experience with broken relationships, whether between spouses, parents and children, siblings, co-workers, or extended family.  

As a pastor, I’ve watched others get knocked down in broken relationships.  Some with spouses, some with siblings, others with parents or their children.  Some with neighbors, others with once-upon-a-time friends.

It’s heart-breaking to see it happen to someone we care about, and it’s devastating to experience yourself.  I know that too.

I’ve spoken many times about growing up in this part of the state, and some of my early childhood experiences.   I’ve talked about Johnson, and Syracuse and growing up as a farm kid, but I’ve not ever talked directly about my family of origin and my family’s brokenness.  It’s risky taking such personal things into the pulpit, but if there is one thing I have some experience with, it is God’s redemption born out of the bruises and brokenness of severed relationship.

This is a short version, the long version doesn’t serve a purpose nor help here.   In short, my father, a well respected, hard working farmer with no land of his own, began to drink heavily when I was in fifth grade or so.  I was the only child left at home at the time.  After years of scratching it out in the dirt, and raising five of their six kids, for the first time in their lives my parents began to enjoy a bit of fruit of their hard work.  The extra income bumped their lifestyle a bit, and with it came more social opportunities, and events lubricated with alcohol.   My dad also found that whiskey also helped soothe his chronic pain and before long he was downing several fifths a week.

When I was in the 8^th grade, he left.   I don’t mean left as in my parents separated or divorced, but left as in he walked out one day to go live with another woman, leaving behind all responsibilities, which included the farm, and of course, my mother and me.   We were left to fend for ourselves.  We moved into a dusty old house on my grandfather’s farm that hadn’t been occupied for two decades.  The rent was free, the propane supplied, and our needs were mostly met by occasional checks my mother’s sisters sent from Colorado, Oklahoma and Washington.  You see, she didn’t work, because the shame of my father’s alcoholism and abandonment devastated her.  Sinking into a deep depression, my mother didn’t leave the house for more than a year.  She emerged finally to enter the hospital.   Much of her digestive tract was perforated by colitis and diverticulitis.  For weeks, she clung to life, and eventually improved enough to return home.   It would be many months before she could work.    

My older brothers and sisters were all married with children of their own, and nothing extra to contribute.

I got a job washing dishes at the Coffee Cup Café.  It afforded me some pop money, but more than that, subsidized my Mother and I’s meager living. 

Life was playing hardball. And we got hurt.

        Please, I have not recounted this story for your sympathy, or your concern.   My past has shaped much of who I am, including my values and my character.  It has helped me realize that while the old saying “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle” is only part right.   The truth is, the world can certainly give us more than we can handle.   But I also learned through those experiences, that God, and God’s people, are the ones who help us survive when the world gives us more than we can carry.

        I truly believe today that I am part of the body of Christ, because of the kindnesses, support and encouragement I received from Christians through those dark and difficult times, and as I stepped into adulthood.

        It is God, and God’s people, those quirky, tender, and helpful people of the church, who helped me when times were tough.   I could not do it alone.   I did not do it alone.   I had not boot straps to pull myself up with.   I am not a self-made man.   And that’s why I struggle so much with the idea of self-reliance.  To take care of oneself is important, but when one begins to believe that in all situations, one must shun help and rely only upon one’s own strength and resources, then one has no good use for God.  

God is God of Relationship.   God created humanity out of God’s own need for companionship, this is the first relationship.   Then, seeing the human’s need for companionship, created male and female, the second of the many relationships that sustain most persons. 

Male and female produce offspring, forming the parent-child relationships and the sibling relationships.  Generations extend those connections, and eventually we seek connection to others, the relationship of friendship, and we form civic relationships to bring order to our lives together, and we form working relationships to accomplish tasks that are more strenuous or complex than those we can do on our own.

Indeed, the story of God is the story of God nurturing relationship with human beings.   One of the places this is illustrated in the Bible is in the book of Hosea.  It’s an embarrassing story, it’s a story that can whip the imagination up into a froth.  But at its core, it is a story of relationship, and just how important relationship is to God.

God feels as though His people have cheated on him with other gods.  The language God uses to explain this to Hosea, his prophet, is the language a jilted lover would use.  God feels as if the people have so little respect and love for him that they, like an adulterer, have chosen to lie in the arms of another.

God wants Hosea to understand fully what he is feeling, and asks Hosea to take a local prostitute, Gomer, as his wife.  The wife is not faithful to Hosea, and gives birth to child after child, none of whom belong to the prophet.

Clearly, the woman has little regard for the marriage, and no more love for her husband than for the other men she takes as lovers.  

Eventually, Hosea’s wife leaves him altogether.  This is how it is between me and the people Israel, god tells him.   This is how I feel.   Betrayed.  Hurt.   Cut off.

Then God tells Hosea to go and find his wife, and bring her home.   Hosea goes searching for her, and finds her in the arms of yet another lover.  He is forced to pay a pretty price, in essence to purchase her as his slave in order to bring her home.   

Hosea understands completely.   God, hurt as God is, continues to reach out to the people of Israel, hoping to bring them back to live once again as God’s people.  God does this because, God is God of relationship. God of community.  It is God’s character and God’s nature—God is the creative force of relationship and community in the universe.

        Those who eventually get up from the dirt after being knocked dow do so, I believe, through the love, encouragement and help offered by others.   That was certainly true in my own life. 

        Relationship with my father was cut off.   In the following 20 years of his life, I would see him only a handful of times.   Those times were civil, but I was not ever to have the father-son relationship I lost when he left.  

        I might have chosen the path of revenge.   Seeking to take out my anger either on him or on others for what happened.   But to fuel my anger and my desire for vengeance only kept me in the role of the victim.  To follow this option would never allow me to assume responsibility for my own actions, but rather react only to that which I assumed was an insult or injury. 

        I might have chosen the path of detachment.   Hurt once, unable to love or be loved by anyone else again.   Closing off the heart from all access.  If not, I might become vulnerable, and if vulnerable, then open to hurt again.

        But I chose a different path.  I noticed, as I lay in the dust there were hands offering to pull me up.  I grabbed hold.   They dusted me off.   Dried my tears.  Soothed my pain.  Some gave me just the right words of encouragement.  Others helped me pursue an education.   At the right time, some were open to talking about their own relationships, especially their relationship with God.

        I witnessed as others cared for my mother.   Her family and good, caring, Christian neighbors held her through her pain, and eventually encouraged her as she healed.  

One such man was the local sheriff who offered my mother a job as a dispatcher and jailer.   He had to be nuts.   She was the worst dispatcher the county ever had—for awhile.  She couldn’t memorize all the ten-codes for the radio, and she might have accidently sent the volunteer fire department to the wrong house, but her co-workers, her friends continued to encourage her.   Help her.  And they praised her for what she did do well…which was cook.  She was a good cook, having honed her craft through six well-fed kids.  And so, through the night she cooked for the prisoners in the country jail on her night shifts, enough for all three of the next day’s meals. 

        And she got her life back.  She got back into the game.   God did not abandon her.   Did not give up on her.   Did not give up on us.  But connected us to good people, so that relationship might redeem the hurt we’d experienced.

Many of you have heard or been emailed the story of the 1976 Seattle Special Olympics, and the nine disabled contestants lined up to run the 100-yard dash. At the gun, they all started out, not exactly in a dash, but with relish to run the race to the finish and win.

All, that is, except one little boy who stumbled on the asphalt, tumbled over a couple of times, and began to cry.   Immediately, two competitors heard the boy cry.  They stopped and looked back, and then rushed back to his side. One girl with Down's Syndrome bent down and kissed him and said, "This will make it better."  Then they helped their competitor up, and the three of them walked together to the finish line, arm and arm.   People in the stadium who noticed what had occurred stood, and the cheering went on for several minutes.

The story reminds us how God provides for those who are down and hurt.  We may fall down alone, but we get up together.