I'm 15 Today

As I look out my office window this May 9, 2012, the skies that were sunny less than an hour ago have darkened with clouds and the rain has begun. Have I mentioned it’s kind of cold? It is. This is the perfect climate for this date in my life. There is so much I would love to share about this date, but you will get bored, fall asleep, fall out of the window and die if I share it all. So, please get started with this link.

I suggest playing it a hundred times. You can read while it plays, if you like. I’m just the blogger. And there’s no visual to look at.

OK, here it goes. Once upon a time I wrote a really long essay about my tumultuous relationship with baseball and my Dad. OK, on the surface it’s about baseball, but it’s really about me and Dad (and other men who came up short in my early life) and the wounds I chose to pick at long after they should have scarred over. OK, maybe it's really about my inability to grow up long after I should have. You can think of it however you like. I'm just the blogger. A couple of excerpts [with new parenthetical thoughts] may help express why today is so special. Here we go. 

1994. What a year! Whatever traces of any great myths of Dad and me or baseball and me were shattered and I finally took my hands off of them. The Major League Players’ strike of 1994 was strike three with me. I no longer believe in baseball; not like Americans used to want to believe in it. Greed had made it a lie. Then my Dad defenses finally crumbled. That Memorial Day weekend, I came home falling down drunk from a party and the rest of my heartache over what should have been with Dad came spilling out. I yelled and screamed and cried on my bed, scaring my amazing wife half to death while I wailed about how he was supposed to love me, he was supposed to care about me. She laid down the law that night. I was going to get some help. I had to let go. It wouldn’t be easy, some days it’s still not, but giving up the major myths of my life helped me to see myself and those I love for who they really are and to love that way, too. If I could forgive my offenders, maybe I could forgive myself. [Somewhere in 1996 or so, I let my Dad off the hook.]

But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.- Luke 15:20

 [Flash Forward 3 Mays]

It’s a funny thing sometimes how the [Holy] Spirit works. I hadn’t believed in baseball for years when I found myself back in Riverfront Stadium [Cincinnati] one unusually cold weekend in the Spring of 1997. It was May 9, a Friday evening and there were 45,000 people in the stands, all men. I went with 80 guys [from my church, it was a Promise Keepers men’s conference I had been dragged to by a friend] and we parked in my favorite section in the green seats on the first base line. The Reds weren’t even around; they were on a road trip. There was someone standing on a platform out in centerfield, talking about men and their struggles. As he began to list them, temptation, lust, homosexuality, porn, adultery, etc. it suddenly occurred to me that maybe I hadn’t been walking through this life as the only man with hurts. I mean [the evangelist who was preaching] Crawford Lorritts seemed to know that there were guys in the stadium dealing with struggles just like me, so I considered consciously for the first time that among the crowd that surrounded me, there were guys who felt just as trapped as I did. So, I listened to see what God might say to me. As though pre-ordained from the beginning of time, at 9:10 pm, Dr. Lorritts posed to us this question,

“Then how is it gentlemen, that we get home before dark, spiritually?”

            Suddenly the stadium lights were brighter, suddenly the lights of heaven were shining or maybe they were always there and I could finally see them, but whatever the case, something changed drastically at the center of my being. I looked up and saw a vision like a wall falling down and on the other side was Jesus, [but he didn't look all goofy and dressed in a bath robe like He always does in artwork. Just sayin' ] arms wide open, waiting for me to come home. I tore off the mask and broke from second. [Baseball metaphor left over from the original essay but, cool nonetheless] With my Dad forgiven, I was now able to forgive myself and more importantly let God forgive me. Since that day I have been running for home as fast as I can. Tripping, falling and stumbling sometimes; other times soaring above the mire of life, always on the base path though, rounding third and heading for home. [Joe Nuxhall remained cool even after MLB was not] Home to where my loving Abba, who wanted to love me all along, is waiting and watching down the road for this crying boy to come running back to His arms.   Life is still life and the earthbound circumstance in which I suck in air is not always an easy place to be, but the adventure is always amazing and the final destination is set. That incredible moment of surrender changed the course of everything. God hit a grand slam for me and set me free to run like a little boy again. [May 9 is a pretty sweet day for me. God is good.]