“Hey kid, do you want to play with us?”
The little league coach’s words were genuine. The pain they caused unintended.
Our home in San Marcos, Texas, was only a few blocks from the little league stadium and complex. As was often the case, I had gotten permission to ride my high handlebars, banana-seat bike down to watch the practice and games. As always, I brought my glove and ball, which I tossed in the air and caught outside the field fences as others teamed up to practice and play.
“No sir, I can’t.”
I turned, ran to my bike, and rode as fast as I could home to throw the ball angrily into my pitch back and disdain Ellen White, a prophetess within my family’s Adventist faith tradition, just a bit more.
Being a parent in any generation is hard but I think raising kids in the 60’s must have been especially difficult. My parents had been raised in a world with tight definitions. You did this. You did that. You didn’t question authority – especially the church – and you never asked why. And now they had to parent alongside the Vietnam-war inspired hippie generation that asked “why” to anything and challenged everything. Somehow even at a young age we had picked up on the changes happening around us and learned the power of that three letter missive – “why?”
I knew the theoretical “why.” I had been told it a thousand times. But my parents didn't know the real why, which is why they used the fall back of “Ellen White says” to many of the parenting rules they felt compelled to enforce but also didn’t understand. Ellen White says you can’t swim in the river we are camping by on Sabbath. Ellen White says you can’t ride your bikes on Sabbath. Ellen White says competition is wrong and that is why you can’t play little league.
To exist successfully, any organization has to have clear definitions. Church organizations are no different. In addition to its worship day, the Adventist church which I grew up in focused much of its definitions and identities on lifestyle. Once I understood that the “red books” from which parents’ Ellen says quotes came were largely a church mashing together and binding into red covers mostly out-of-context comments from its prophetically gifted early leader as a means to protect its differentiating culture, I began to understand or at least believe that Ellen White never felt the way she was presented. Her comments, I suspect, were explained principles not prescribed practices. None-the-less, my parents and many of their 60s parenting contemporaries within the Adventist faith used them as their coping mechanism for the changes happening around them and their profound inability to actually know the answer to our “why?” questions. They were from a world of clear definitions. Unexplored and unchallenged. They needed a source for definitions where questioning was off limits and these supposed “words from a prophet” they likely had never read fit the bill. But it was counterproductive at best and many in my generation who got the “Ellen White says” zingers choose to not have the “red books” in our homes today.
The answer I desperately wanted to give to the coach was, “Yes sir, I’d love to.” Like with the hippies redefining America for me, I didn’t get the hypocrisy happening around me. Why was it we would faithfully listen to the Astros compete? Or, go to the Astrodome to watch them compete but not compete ourselves … except at church social work-up games, or every Saturday night for church game night, or at Sabbath afternoon JMV programs where we went out into the Texas Hill Country to compete to see which team could find the most items on the nature list (which included rattles from a rattlesnake and a live armadillo … a story for another day)?
But we couldn’t be on a baseball team? ….. Until, that is, it was a church league team.
The church league was part of the city of Sandy, Oregon, parks and recreation program. Our Hood View church had so many repressed-by-Ellen ball players that we had to field two teams … which ironically met in the league championship series. In spite of my lack of little league training I was a top 10 hitter in the league and caught in full stride the deep line drive to the center field fence that sealed the championship. My parents attended every game. Somehow with church league status and a prayer before the game, it wasn’t really “competition” after all.
Not many years later, Dad attended my younger sibling’s College Place, Washington, little league games too. Not only had the family rules clearly changed, so had the welcome mat. An opposing pitcher refused to pitch to my sibling. One opposing team even walked off the field for a bit. And, upon arriving at the first practice, the coach’s welcome was, “What are you doing here?” She was there to play baseball and had come prepared, showing the coach the league rules which nowhere stipulated that a player had to be male. They had no “red books” to fall back on. In the face of great objection, she forced them to let her play and ended up being one of the batting leaders in the league. Dad, who was far from progressive on the male chauvinism scale, discovered his justifications and cheered his competing “rule-breaker,” gender-integrating child on.
Stadiums and ball fields more than many other venues call us into a magnifying glass look into our confused lives. We bend, blend, and befuddle the rules of our lives to join the events of our choosing or reject those we disdain happening within these venues. They force our choices. They expose hidden hypocrisies. They make us really dig deeply into the question “why?” And, more often than not, find us grasping to find the principles from which our evolved-into-murkiness current life rules once emanated. Uncannily, our stadium stories say much about us.
Not long ago my adult daughters questioned me as to why the drunken, four-letter-filled stands at the Chiefs games I wouldn’t let them join me for during their childhood years were okay for my Christian walk at the time. I’m still looking for the answer. Do you by chance have a set of red books I might borrow?
“These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they have been taught.” - God (Isaiah 29:13)