There was a daddy who had nine big, strapping sons that formed the starting lineup of the best team that ever played baseball. The daddy was the manager, and he always found fault with anything his sons did. Let one of his sons hit a homerun, and he would say something like, “Boy, he put the ole’ apple right down the middle, didn’t he? Blind man coulda hit that one. Your grandma coulda put the wood on that one. If a guy couldn’t hit that one, there’d be something wrong with him, I’d say. Wind practically took that one out of here, didn’t even need to hit it much.”
If you think that was bad, you should have heard him when one of them made a mistake. It was obvious that this wasn’t “home on the range,” because there was always a discouraging word. His sons could never please him, and if they did, he forgot it. When his oldest son, Edwin Jim, Jr., turned and ran to the centerfield fence for a long fly ball and threw his glove forty feet in the air to snag the ball and caught the ball and glove, his daddy said, “I saw a man in Superior, Wisconsin, do that a long time ago, but he did it at night, and the ball was his a lot harder.”
Thought: Those boys could have used some encouragement. What is true of sons in general is true of sons of God. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (2 Corinthians 1:3-5).
