Rock n Roll 17th Hole

I haven't played a round of golf since my honeymoon, and like a lot of other things I used to follow in my younger days, I don't really watch a lot of professional golf anymore.  But every few years the wife and I like to journey up to the big city as the Korn Ferry PGA tour comes to town.  Wow, that's really a terrible name, I know...but watching golfers on the AAA tour is still an impressive thing.  They're on the way up or on the way down or chasing a dream that will never happen, but they do it all so well.  Today we walked 18 holes behind a random guy who shot a 62, with a chip in off the green, a near-albatross, and most impressively an 18th hole 60-foot downhill putt from the fringe to save par.  I'm always in awe of people who do what they do far better than anything I do.  

But somewhere around the 8th hole as we were heading back towards the clubhouse I could faintly hear off in the distance Gettin' Jiggy With It.  At first I thought it was a loud car going by, then perhaps a stereo from one of the houses that line the golf course.  But it soon became evident that the music was pumping from one of the hospitality portals on the 17th hole.  Lots of loud music continued to follow, alongside occasional trivia questions, promotional reads for the tourney sponsors, and a DJ getting an increasingly drunk crowd (who likely never saw any of other 17 holes) hyped.  

Throughout the rest of the round from various spots on the course I could continue to hear the music and the DJ to varying degrees of loudness...all the while the golfers in our group were rock solid, one bogey between them through the first sixteen holes.  The seventeenth hole came about, with the giant grandstand holding thousands of drunk people behind the green paying no attention to the quality that was before them, the thing they were ostensibly there to see, and my golfers finally cracked: two of them bogeying putts that they had not missed all day as they tried and failed to concentrate amongst the dull roar of the drunks around them.  I really, really felt bad for them.  Yes, I know, all the golfers had to endure the same thing.  But why on earth does it have to be like this?  

Go to almost any sport now and there is rarely silence anywhere.  Between pitches or as the basketball teams walks the ball up the floor or as the centers face off, there always has to be those 15 seconds of LOUD LOUD LOUD.  It's like our world has told us that we aren't capable of enjoying anything on our own anymroe, that there has to be a pounding soundtrack to the moments of our lives.  I don't like it, but hearing this on a golf course knocked a bit of the magic out of the day.  These are top-level professional athletes (yes, even minor leaguers are unbelievable in their skill levels).  Why can't we be trusted to enjoy what they do without all the fake artificial noise?  As much as I loved watching our golfers today, I really hated that 17th hole.  

End of Job Limerick

Next week I will finish my 7th and final year of driving a school bus for our local school district.  I might go and keep driving for another district in the area, as I really do like the kids, I like the hours, I like the driving, and I like that for a part-time job it actually pays pretty well, especially in this time in which CDL drivers are finally getting paid what they are worth.  But I just can't keep driving where I'm at now.  

Several people who know that I'm quitting have asked me why, and at times I tell them at least part of the story, and other times I fall back on the old excuse, "I just need a change."  A part of me wants to write a 30-page screed listing each of the reasons why I want to leave (30 pages may not be long enough as these final few days wind down).  Another part of me thinks about expressing myself through a screenplay about the brave and honorable bus driver saving the children from the bogeymen of school administrators and road graders.  

But honestly I just don't think I want to spend my time doing something that nobody really cares about.  So today I came up on my 5th-to-last route a little limerick that I should pull out if I get asked again.  

There once was a driver from Mulvane.

The incompetent admins were driving him insane.

He thought about raising a mad mob,

But wisdom told him to quit the job,

Because it's just not worth the mental pain.

Why 'WE' Suck

Sitting here watching Sporting Kansas City lose yet again tonight, a long, perfect line in their quest for a winless season.  This comes after a weekend in which I watched my daughter's JV soccer team get outscored a combined 12-0 in three tournament games in 24 hours (miraculously we won one of those three in a shootout against a team slightly worse than us).  And I am a longtime fan of the 2015 World Champion Kansas City Royaals, who as of this writing are 4-15 and may break records for incompetence this season.  Yes, this is maybe the universe balancing out the fact that the Chiefs have won the Super Bowl twice in four years and I we get to watch Patrick Mahomes do amazing things every fall Sunday.  But right now the most of the teams that I can say that I genuinely support (Shrewsbury Town FC doesn't count as I've still never seen them live, thanks COVID breaking out in March 2020) are hot garbage.  

Yes, sports doesn't mean as much as it used to.  My favorite team for the past decade has been whatever teams my kids happen to be playing for.  And with anything besides my loved ones, I know that I'm rooting for laundry.  But still, sports helps shape our lives.  And so why does it have teo be so bad?  Why do I hate watch them with a special sports anger towards Khiry Shelton?  

So since it would be unkind to dissecte my daughter's soccer team, and the Royals I still have not watched in person, let's look at Sporting KC.  Why do 'we' suck?  

1. MLS is different than it was a decade ago.  It has almost twice as many teams, and investment in many teams, old and new, far outstrips what SKC is doing.  We still act like being a mid-major club is good enough.  That we still have this mindset now makes it seem like we can't compete.

2. We have done a poor job in turning over the squad.  Even as we haven't developed and then kept decent youngsters (e.g. G Busio, potentially great here but floundering in the Italian second division), we hold onto guys who have stayed around too long like Graham Zusi and Roger Espinoza, and we allow Khiry Shelton to think he's a major component of this team.

3. The guys we do bring in like Erick Thommy and Remi Walter are solid players (I mean, they are at least better than Khiry Shelton), but nobody that will really push the team towards greatness.  We need solid players, but when do ever sign somebody that really changes things?  

4. Khiry Shelton is still on this team.

5. Too many injuries for a small squad mean that when Alan Pulido gets hurt, Khiry Shelton plays a lot.  

6. We don't have the players for Vermes' 4-3-3, but we still continue to play it, just as we did a decade ago.  Formation is not the biggest problem with this team...but somewhere there needs to be a recognition that just because it worked in olden days, that doesn't mean it will work now.  

7. Finally, as I watch SKC try to chase this game tonight, we just brought Khiry Shelton on as a substitute.  Somehow I don't see this wroking out well. 

(10 minutes later, watching the end of the game)

Yep, we lost again.  Dang.

On Sports Fandom

 It's hard to be a sports fan these days.  If your team tries to be decent members of society, they often end up being hot garbage on the field.  Instead, we are glad when our team picks up the all-star free agent who is free because he threw his pregnant girlfriend down a flight of steps six months ago and we hope that at least for the rest of the season he can keep from being a complete dirtbag, at least in public.  Rooting for decent people is nice...but winning is everything.  

The World Cup began this week.  It's being held in November and December instead of it's traditional summer place, because it's being held in Qatar, a place that most of us couldn't place on a map until three weeks ago.  And it's held as the frost settles on our cars each morning because in Qatar if it was held in summer players would literally die on the field because of the heat.  

Thing is, lots of people have died to build the stadiums in Qatar.  And the survivors, mostly people from India and Bangledesh imported to provide the brute labor needed to build such things, have been repeatedly documented to be living in squalid living conditions and often cheated out of their negotiated wages.  They're basically slaves, living as slaves in a nation that currently has the highest GDP in the world becuase of its oil revenues.  

Of course, now the matches have started.  We've watched England put a half-dozen past Iran, Saudi Arabia upset tournament faves Argentina, and our household team the USA underwhelm again.  We don't really care about those other stories now, as long as we get our sports.  

And maybe that's how it's supposed to be.  We live in a world of trouble and misery and maybe these kinds of games keep us from thinking about things too much.  I'll watch, but it's just not as much fun as it ought to be.  

The analogy of divorce

God hates divorce, according to the prophet Malachi.  And according to Jesus, Moses allowed divorce only because of the hard hearts of people.  It seems rather clear that divorce should never be a first option in a difficult relationship.  Far too many people divorce for the wrong reasons (just as they got married for the wrong reasons).  

But divorce may well be a necessary legal remedy, even for Christians.  Think of the woman who is abused by her husband...should she not have the ability to divorce her husband for her safety and the safety of her children?  Think of the man whose wife continually cheats on him and has no desire to stay faithful...should he not have the ability to divorce his wife and eventually marry a woman who desires to stay faithful?  Think of the spouse whose partner leaves simply because they no longer desire to be married...should the innocent party not have some remedy to end the marriage and move on with their life rather than be dragged down by somebody who has no intention to stay in the marriage?  

Throughout my 27 years of ministry I have come across many men and women who have been divorced.  None of them enjoyed it.  None of them wanted to do it.  None of them willingly accepted it.  But for each of them divorce was the last option to remedy a bad situation.  It allowed them to move on and start over again after years, even decades of hurt.  

I'm guessing that few Christians today would think that all divorce should be banned...having had church friends or family members go through it, we have compassion and realize that there are at times necessary reasons for it.  

But what about abortion?  As my state of Kansas will most likely in two weeks vote to begin a process to make abortion illegal in this state (as many others have done), I've been thinking a lot about this issue.  Since many of my fellow Christians believe it is a good thing to ban it, I've been searching the Scriptures to see what God says about abortion...and I've found (here's the dirty little secret) that the Scriptures are silent.  There may be a couple of passages in the Old Testament about how God knew a prophet in his mother's womb or how we are made by God.  But these are usually calling passages or passages poetically speaking about the love of God for people who are hurting; to use passages like Psalm 139:13-14 ("For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.") as a blanket statement of the sanctity of life at conception is a gross misuse of the Scriptures.  As far as direct passages about abortion itself, even as I am guessing it has been practiced since at least the days of the Patriarchs, the Bible says nothing about it.  Nada.  Zip.  Zilch.  It's as if God willfully and pointedly chose to stay silent on this issue when he could have said something.  

Abortion should never be a first option, and as I said in my last post about how when the fetus becomes viable at about the 5-6 month mark we should protect that child.  But before that, the mother (and father) might have to make the difficult decision about whether or not to go through the pregnancy.  And while in a perfect world all children would be welcome, we don't live in perfect world with pregnancy any more than we do marriage.  We grieve that marriages might end, and we grieve that pregnancies might end.  But is it not better to keep that (poor) option open for the sake of those who are seeking to live their lives?  

Should a woman struggling to raise three children alone be forced to bear a fourth?  Should expectant parents who learn through prenatal testing that their child will live a brutal and painful few years before dying of a terrible genetic disorder have to ensure that child lives out its terrible fate?  Should a college student bear the weight of a bad choice on a Friday night for the rest of her life?  Should a 10-year-old child who has been raped (a very real story in the news) be forced to endure nine months of a pregnancy?  We recognize that all these situations are unfortunate, or worse.  We admit that in some of these instances the pregnant woman might well bear some responsibility for getting pregnant.  And we genuinely wish that we didn't even have to talk about these things.

But we live in the real world, and in that world divorces, bankruptcies, restraining orders, and the like are necessary.  Shouldn't abortion be considered the same way?