HOW CHRISTIANITY WORKS
B eing an umpire isn’t exactly a short-cut to winning friends and influencing people. You call what you see and if the fans and players see it differently you’re in for a rough time. But somebody’s got to call the game and when it’s all over and the heat and fury have died away you find that both fans and players respect your judgment. Maybe life’s a little like that. At least when I get to thinking about the real meaning of life it’s rather easy for me to imagine it a lot like a game. It has its start and excitement and rhubarbs and dull mo ments and its finish. Sometimes the game is called off after a few innings because of an unexpected storm and sometimes it runs to the normal nine inn ings and sometimes it runs a little extra. But each game ends. And always the umpire makes some decisions. As a kid my recurring dream was that of being a big league baseball player. My mother was a faithful Christian and she prayed that someday I might under stand in a personal way the meaning of God’s demand upon my life. In 1947, when I was a high school senior, I was invited to an evangelistic service. There I heard about God’s demand upon every life. I knew I had never done anything about this demand. And more than anything else I wanted to do something about it. So right there that night I told God that I wanted to commit myself to Him. I told Him I wanted His demands to become operative in my life. That’s how I became a Christian. Like I said, I sometimes get to thinking about life being like a ball game. Somebody has to make the final decisions and in life only God writes the rales and makes the un alterable decisions. In a ball game no player can ever write his own rales. In the heat of the game he often wishes he could. He can’t. And all the wishing in the world can’t change the facts. In life God has things well in hand. The rules have all been written. We can’t change them. I think the hardest thing for us humans to do is to understand life has hard-and-fast rales. We get to thinking in fuzzy terms. We imagine that just for us the rales can he changed. We say if God is just He won’t condemn us. Yet if we said the same thing about an umpire in a ball game we’d be laughed off the field. What the umpire says goes. If he changed the rules he’d be unjust. And God being God cannot be unjust. Well, I don’t mean to preach a sermon. But these thoughts rather make sense to my way of reasoning. The Bible says that “The wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus.” If you haven’t read the Gospel of John in the New Testament within the last year read it over this week. Check the rules of life given by God Himself. Then give yourself an honest quiz to see if the de mands of these rales are binding upon your life. Don’t push it off to some other time. Life is far too important for such indecision. END.
I’m an UMPIRE by Ted Springer
Top photo shows Springer umpiring at the Phillies’ winter camp in Clearwater , Fla. In bottom photo Springer ( right) poses with Champion Joe DiMaggio.
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SEPTEMBER 1956
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