The Green Monster

It’s almost October, and that means it is time for me to start watching baseball.  The season is so long, with so many games that I just can’t make myself care until we get close to the playoffs.  And it is shaping up to be a nail-biter for all you Texas fans; they could still do it but it is going to be tough.  I root for several teams because I’m not extremely passionate about any one team (I mean, this isn’t football after all), and one of the teams I do root for has clenched their division.  The Boston Red Sox will move on to October baseball.  Take that, Yankees fans!

I have been to Fenway Park before.  Granted, we couldn’t get tickets and so I just bought a t-shirt instead, but I have been.  I have touched the side of the building, that’s as close as I was able to get.  That is one of the most iconic baseball stadiums ever built.  It is small for a major league stadium, but it is also unrelenting.  They call the left field wall “The Green Monster” for its sheer size, the highest among any MLB field.  It keeps all those right handers from making grand slams game after game after game.

At the risk of a cheesy transition, there is another kind of green monster: jealousy.  And it often does the same thing, stand in the way of our dreams.  We spend a lot of time jealous because someone is better looking or has more friends or scores more touchdowns or gets better grades or has a boyfriend or gets more retweets or whatever we want to be jealous about.  We think that this act of jealousy will somehow make things better, but the truth is it only makes things worse.  God wants us to live “out of the park” lives, but instead we stay trapped in the infield by our own selfishness, pride, and desire for the things others have.  We focus on what we don’t have instead of the things that we do have.  Imagine if we could live the life that God has blessed us with, without feeling a need to have what He has given to others.  That would truly be the grand slam that He has for us.