Strikeouts and a Walk-Off Home Run

 

We ended our seasons by striking out.  Each of the kids—Owen (16), Brendan (14) and Kinsley (13) each played on baseball or softball teams this year.  Each of them had successful years, individually.  Each of them no only lost their last game, but ended their season with their last plate appearance resulting in a strikeout. 

 

As we mark the 17^th anniversary of our son Micah’s homegoing today, we reflect on what we have lost in these past 17 years.  I assure our fellow grief sojourners that we never stop grieving.  You never stop missing the ones you hold dear.  We could not encourage Micah in music, sports and school. We could not enjoy encouraging his unique attributes flourish into who God made Micah to be.  From a worldly perspective, we struck out with Micah even before the game started.

 

But we live in the faith that there is more than what we see on the field and in our physical, temporal lives.  We trust in the God who not only created us, but sent His son Jesus to die for us, and to give us new life in Jesus.  That Jesus, because He is God, was able to take on the punishment that we deserved, and died the death we should have died, in order that we can experience God’s love for us eternally. 

 

We join the apostle Paul in trusting that God is sovereign over pain, suffering, and death.

 

“When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the moral puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

 

               “Death is swallowed up in victory.”

               Death, where is your victory?

               O death, where is your sting.

 

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

 

My senior year in college, I struck out to end my team’s season, and my college career.  All of us have stuck out—if not in baseball, but certainly in life.  But in Christ we have a great home run hitter.  We have the great Savior who will not only save us from our deaths, and resurrect our buried son, but show us how the grief and tears of the past 17 years have been worth it all.  Instead of a strikeout, Micah was intentionally walked, and then Jesus sent him Home to Heaven through a walk-off home run.  A home run, through no credit of Micah’s, but because of the superior ability of our Savior Lord.  All of us will likewise share in the victory that Micah experienced on July 27, 2009, when Jesus “hit him Home to Heaven” through the greatest of walk-off Homers.