Mark's Blog

I love baseball! I started in Little League when I was 10 years-old and by the time I was eleven, I had found my position. I was a pitcher. I threw hard and could get the ball over the plate—all you need to dominate when you are eleven!

One Wednesday night when I was eleven, I was having a great night. After four innings of our five-innings game, the other team had no hits. I had pretty much struck out every batter.  But it was 7:15 and church started at 7:30.

My mom and dad gave me the choice of staying or leaving, but there was no doubt what they thought the right decision was, so we left the game and went to church.  No regrets, not really any big deal. In my family, it was just the right thing to do.

Now, I know that we have discovered that Wednesday nights don’t count—so it may be difficult to even relate to family values that were so different, but it is not about Wednesday nights. It’s about an 11-year kid learning that what he is doing is not the most important thing in the world.

That was 1958. Let me show you how that translated into the Woodward family of 1987. Ben, our middle son, loves everything sports, but especially baseball.  By the time he was eleven, he had played several seasons of Little League—or parts of several seasons.  You see, when Ben was four years old, Sherrylee and I started taking our family to Europe each summer for Let’s Start Talking mission projects.

I would usually go with the students about mid-May and Sherrylee would stay home with the kids until school was out about June 1.  Little league baseball season usually started about the first of May and went until the end of June.  This meant that Ben was only around for a couple of weeks of practice and a 3-4 games at the most–every summer.

We always registered Ben for Little League. We always paid the fee for the whole season and we paid for the uniform. We got the bat and the glove that he needed, and we made sure that he got to every practice and every game—BUT, Ben knew that baseball and his activities were not at the center of our familiy’s summer activities.

We did not ignore Ben’s needs. No matter where we were in Europe, we bought a daily newspaper for him so he could study the box scores and follow his baseball teams.  Every year, we asked friends who had Armed Forces Network television to tape the All-Star Game for us, and then whenever we passed through their city, we would all sit down and watch the All-Star game with Ben.

I don’t remember Ben ever complaining. I don’t know if he knew what he was learning.  He knew we loved him, but he knew that he was not at the center of our family’s universe.

I could have told you about purchasing dumbbells in Germany and taking them around wherever we went so that Philip could lift weights after he started playing prep football. We didn’t stay home.

We did all kinds of things for our kids while we were traveling every summer, knowing that we wanted them to love what we were doing. We went to theme parks, we put all three of them in German church camp, and one summer we even arranged for Philip to go to soccer camp in the Netherlands—where he was the only “foreigner.”  But we did not stay home!

For most kids, I would not advise preaching the “seek ye first the kingdom of God” sermon to make this point. That’s a sermon for parents.  For kids, it suffices to learn from the decisions their parents make that the world—especially the world of their family—does not center on them! They are important—but not the center.

Then, of course, the big question becomes what is the center of your family’s universe? If you want to make sure that your children grow a heart for the mission of God, then make sure they see you making decisions that clearly make the mission of God the center of your family’s world!