Missing Golf

I miss playing golf.  I love golf.  The game grips me.  It has wrapped me in its tentacles since I first learned to hit a ball while in college, back in 1988, at Pensacola Christian College…  I love the feeling of a well hit ball.  I love to hit a good 5 iron and see it journey 170 or so yards.  Maybe 190 if I’m really lucky.  Well, at least I could do that five or six years ago.

I’ve aged.  I’ve had open-heart surgery.  I’ve been busy.  My spinal column doesn’t serve me well like it once did.

Even with a 6 year old who LOVES the game, I’ve not played in over a year.  Close to two years.  Wow.

Much of it is a fear of how bad it will hurt the first time I go out.  I’m sure that I will suffer for a long time as a result of something around 60 full swings and 40 or so putts.  A couple of casual hits in the yard seems to have a pretty good impact on my pain level for a week or so.  I already slam down 3 ibuprofen in the morning with alarming regularity just to control the pain from my normal activities.  I can only imagine the Sunday morning after a real round of golf.

But I hope to take the boy out for at least a short outing this Saturday, if the weather holds.  We’ll probably golf terribly, but I bet we’ll have fun.

I see the same mess in my spiritual life.

I fall out of spiritual “shape”.  I get knocked down in a few battles, take some hits, get hurt, and sit back to recover for a while.

The only problem is that I never re-enter the game.  I continue my recovery for so long that I forget how to do what I was doing before.  I lose interest, even though that intimate, continual, loving relationship with Jesus Christ is the most awesome experience I could ever have.  I get distracted, and I become afraid of being hurt again.

I spiritually flop on the couch and wonder why the spiritual grass in the spiritual front yard is such a mess.  I drive a dirty spiritual car and can’t understand why it isn’t clean.

Being hurt is no excuse to quit.  We gotta keep walking.

Step up.  Anybody else have this kinda mess?

Like

Unlike