Baseball Bat Gardens

Psalm 126:1-2 -- "When the Lord brought back the captive ones of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter and our tongue with joyful shouting."

Long before there was a television in every home, video game consoles with wireless controllers, and computers in every home office, there was this thing called .... playing. Groups of neighborhood kids would gather together in someone's yard or in a near-by park and soak up the sunshine. Imaginations ran wild and cowboys chased Indians, tree forts were built, and in the middle of the dust and gravel at the end of the street, little boys played baseball. The girls weren't invited, they had cooties.

Back then, when a lot of Americans were growing pretty vegetable gardens and it was a safer place for kids to roam on bicycles, there was a boy named Karl [but most people called him David] who ran with a good-natured bunch of kids that could come up with some of the most INGENIOUS pranks. Most neighborhood kids learned from their parents that carrot seeds produced carrots, cucumber seeds produced cucumbers, and when you planted flowers, flowers grew in the garden bed. Never once in all of gardening history had a tomato produced an onion or a tulip bulb produced a daisy. So when Karl informed a younger boy in his neighborhood that if you planted your broken baseball bat in the soil, a brand new baseball bat would grow in it's place - it seemed to make perfect sense. In no time at all, the young boy and a couple of his friends had planted a neat and tidy row of broken baseball bats. Eager to harvest the fruits of his labor, the younger boy headed home to dinner and to bed. He had been told by Karl that tomorrow when the sun came up, he would have a fresh new baseball bat growing in the dirt.

As the night grew long and a bright moon hung high over-head, Karl and his mischievous group of pranksters sneaked out to the baseball bat garden and pulled up all the old broken bats. In the empty holes They "planted" all new bats and arranged the dirt carefully around them so they would stand up straight and tall.  His deed done, he headed home. He was eager to see the look on the younger boys' faces when they set to harvest their baseball bat crop.

Sure enough, the next day the group of younger boys joyfully plucked their freshly produced bats from the garden bed and with unbridled excitement tested them out in a friendly game of baseball. I can just picture the sparkle in each boy's eyes as they rubbed the earth off of their bats and swung them wide to test their strength.

I don't know when or even IF Karl's little adventure was ever found out. I don't know if the younger boy finally determined that some mischief had been at play. But in that moment when he pulled his wooden bat from firmly packed soil, the logic of the event made perfect sense. After all, when you plant a seed, it produces fruit.

All through out nature seeds produce fruit of their own kind. Planted broken baseball bats might not really produce fresh new ones but banana trees produce bananas, apple trees produce apples etc., etc. The only exception to this genetically encoded rule is in the Bible.

In Psalm 126 we see that seeds of sorrow were planted in the people of Zion. Years of captivity and forced labor sewed tears of humility and defeat. They lived life through the haze of an oppressive fog - like those who dream. Days seemed to run together, life events passed without much notice, and reality was a blur. But those seeds of sorrow produced mouths of laughter and tongues full of joy! That doesn't happen anywhere else but in the presence of God and by the grace of His mercy.

Like Karl sneaking out to replace broken bats, God takes the seeds of broken lives and damaged hopes and plants joyous victory in the empty hole that's left. Standing straight and tall in a once devastated spirit is a fresh new tree that bears joy and laughter.

Don't be afraid to let the tears fall and don't give up hope. Take the thing that is broken, plant it in the tender fertile mercy of Jesus and let it go. Cling to the promise of brand new fruit. Remember that the seed for joy was planted a long time ago when Jesus was born. Wait and watch that seed produce a plentiful crop of JOY!