FCA Softball

What a great first week of softball it was. We practiced and I got to learn quite a bit about my teammates that I hadn’t known before. We met up with a couple of people that coordinated some team-building activities for us to kick off the season. I literally thought I knew everything about my teammates until then. It was awesome. The ending though was tough. The question that eats us up, the question that is painful for all of us, the question that we all hate to hear. This question was about the World Series. It’s hard to imagine what this would feel like until we were standing right in it. The pain and the hurt that came with a loss in a national championship game is something that I can’t really explain. I set that aside for a moment and I realized that this is so relevant to not only what I had been going through during that time, but my life.

His Work, His Way and His Timing. Those are the things that came to my mind with the silence of my teammates when he brought up the World Series. The bible says in Ecclesiastes that, “He has made everything beautiful in its time… no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.” You see sometimes we don’t understand the things that God is putting us through. Gosh, I didn’t understand why in the world we had worked so hard all season to lose a game the way we did. But I will say, it was the best experience of my life. I was learning more things through this failure than I had achieving greatness. As we walked off the field that night with tears in our eyes, God gave me a peace in my heart. I knew he was working in all of us and it was evident to others as well. I will never forget what our FCA Team Chaplain, Sarah Roberts, said. She came down onto the field and looked at us in the eyes and said, “Guys, we praise Him when we win, and we praise Him when we lose.” That was so powerful and so incredibly true. So many times when something goes wrong in our lives, we blame God or we ask why God would do such a thing. The problem is that we don’t recognize what God is doing in our lives because we are so focused on the moment. The bible says to be confident that He who has begun work within you will complete it. Why do we question? I did, and I still question that when I think about that night at the World Series. But we must trust God’s timing and His way.

I will never forget the emails, the Facebook messages, and the tweets that my teammates and I received. People saying that we showed so much faith during such a difficult time, people thanking us for being godly examples for younger kids that look up to us. We had people seeing and wanting what we had during a tough time. That was a championship in and of itself. People saw God through us, and that is all that mattered! Yes, it was a tough day but man that is the reason we play, that is the reason we are able to play, for the Glory of God. I love that.

The question was answered. We must understand that God does his own work within us with his own timing in our lives. This is exactly what has been getting our team through tough questions like that. We will trust God’s timing of things. I would lose a national championship game every single time in order for people to see God through our play. What an amazing experience and lesson it was for us all.  

Bri