Wednesday, July 3, 2024
Feast of Saint Thomas, Apostle
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Father’s Day golf with Marc
Brothers and sisters, you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens.
Of course. We had many opportunities to hit the golf ball high and straight, toward the hole. Eighteen holes, a hundred or more opportunities to feel good about ourselves.
But since we are not skilled golfers, nor have we played much at all for a year or two or more, we had maybe two hundred opportunities. Which did give us chance after chance to practice just a little more.
We waited till Father’s Day was over, and then we waited another week. And now, riding in our cart with plenty of time, we were grateful that Brookhill in Rantoul was not a busy place, even on a splendid blue-skied afternoon. No one chased us from behind, and no one seemed to be in front of us either. We helped one guy find his golf ball. Later they were looking for a left-behind club, but we hadn’t seen it.
Through Jesus the whole structure is held together.
Marc and I did not keep score. What would be the fun in that? We played “better ball” mostly, although when neither of us hit the ball better, we just found a good spot to drop our balls and keep on going.
I noticed that the putter I found deep in the back corner of our shed had a slightly bent shaft. It might have cost $3 at Salt and Light. But the putter worked for me. The soft greens treated both of us very kindly. More difficult were the tees, where I had trouble unwinding my body; it stayed a little tied up, so the ball didn’t go far. Marc, on the other hand, discovered something halfway through and his drives began rocketing away. Not always straight, but rocketing.
You know, the scenery at Pebble Beach, where the waves crash against the fairways, and the wild mountain stags that watch courses in the Rockies from high atop their pinnacles, were easily matched yesterday by the flat loamy corn and soybean fields bordering our course, by the dark green oaks and bright green maples, and by the sky, the oh so blue, oh so beautiful sky. Golf in the Midwest gives us far more than you’d expect, and when the rains come just right, and then the sun dries out the greens, it’s heaven. Just plain heaven.
In Jesus you also are being built together into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.
We might not play again for awhile, because life is full. All the more to make this particular day a very special one. I looked back at pictures of us playing golf over the years, and in almost every picture, we were smiling. Just as it should be.
(Ephesians 2, Psalm 117, John 20)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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