Nobody Knows My Swing

Reading is the music that accompanies the machinery of a mundane week’s routines. Pastor Tim Keller, storytelling philosopher Mark Twain, craftsman of the gripping narrative Stephen King, grieving but resilient widow and Facebook luminary Sheryl Sandberg, and the ever buoyant and timeless Henry David Thoreau had their chances in this reader’s weekly batting order. A country boy from small-town Florida with no education beyond high school and a penchant for locker room language and antics shouldn’t have had a chance. Nevertheless, Chipper Jones drives home the motif for the week when he confesses in his memoir Ballplayer, "Nobody knows my swing inside and out the way he did. He built it."

There is theology there that crosses the white lines of the baseball field, if we would have it. Chipper’s father takes a detailed and proprietary interest in the mechanics of his son’s work to an extent we wouldn’t expect from the stranger on the street, or even a passionate fan. If so, Matthew 7:11 grants a crowning intensity to the sort of work details that leaves most of our human audience looking for the quickest polite exit. Jesus says to human fathers like Chipper’s dad, and the ones we know more personally, “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!”

If bread and fish are confidently introduced as examples of the Heavenly Father’s basic, introductory gifts, how much more the ongoing, never bored, never completely exasperated attention of the One Who sees when the sparrows fall? His attention, Luke’s Gospel adds in its rendering of the same assurances is so personal that it includes the indwelling, interwoven residence of God in our details, the Holy Spirit Himself!

So what is the attitude of the Godhead in accompanying us whatever the repetitive, ordinary equivalent of the batting cage is on our jobs? We might be surprised. When Jesus searches through all time and every human example to translate what a human devoted to Him looks like, He doesn’t choose Elijah as the fiery prophet is released from earthly annoyances and raptured directly to Heaven. He doesn’t even choose a contemporary Chipper or one from ages past, a worker of great renown in his or her own day.

Christ’s once-and-for-all Exhibit A both to the first century and every day since is… not a preacher but a plow boy in Luke 9:62. The world may not applaud as the farmer breaks soil, murmur with anticipation as he keeps his eyes forward in order to leave straight rows behind, but God does. He knows and enjoys the swing of our professional and relational lives because He made it. What seems to us another day on the job is to Him a designer original.

The Theology of Chipper’s Swing defies ordinary experience. Just as a copy, of a copy, of a copy, is a gray smudge, repetition dulls excitement and exactitude. It is when what Martin Luther calls the mask of work wears thin over time, that the glory of work’s true purpose begins to shine through in the frayed places. Chipper didn’t focus on his father’s role while executing that proprietary swing perfectly to produce impressive results. He didn’t point to the father’s intimate place in his professionalism until a point in the narrative when Chipper was struggling.

There, where frustration meets ambition aiming at a noble, if sometimes quotidian, purpose, is where the Father meets His own. Just as Chipper could depend on encouragement from his father expressed in a language particular to achieving baseball excellence, so God says in 2 Corinthians 12:9 that His strength is made perfect, is demonstrated most clearly, in our weakness. This, at once intimate connection and ageless promise, is not a theoretical matter.

To Paul as that verse’s original one-man audience, He speaks the dialect of whatever thorn in the flesh Paul asked to have removed. To us, both His strength and His concern for us in particular can shine through in whatever our profession measures and in grace through whatever points of friction tend to occur. Our swing is his swing, ever subject to renewal and refinement.

Even as Chipper and his dad hint toward vertical realities of our Heavenly relationship, they nudge toward subtle humility when living out the results. Aware of who we are in Christ, we want the best for those we care about the most. We want the best, in the worst way. Chipper’s dad designed his son’s swing, and he was available to remind him of it, when his adult son asked. In between, the father made deliberate, even sacrificial space for other voices in his son’s life. He literally quit his job rather than coach his son, believing that fathers can be either too demanding or not demanding enough on their offspring. They can seek copies of themselves, especially in areas of their greatest strength.

Likewise, if we seek to acknowledge Christ’s proprietary authority and interest in our lives, and in the details of our jobs, we must acknowledge His right to work just as uniquely in the lives of others. The voice of our experience to be the right one in some situations, and not others. Those whose flaws we know best have heard our default tone and lessons the most. It is in these closest relationships that we make clear is whether our choice is in Him Who makes and remakes, or in the results we aspire to get from other people’s lives. 

As spouses, as parents, as mentors, and as disciplers, we are like a portrait painter Sheryl Sandberg mentions in Option B. His hands were willing and skilled, but he had a severe visual difficulty that made it possible for him to focus only on one aspect of his subject at a time. Like this practitioner, we focus on the aspects we are allowed to see, trusting only in part in our skills and experience. We trust wholly in the One Who fashions us, our swing, and our ultimate impact.