About a month ago I finished by stint coaching my oldest son Robert's baseball team- the Sidewinders. This was Robert's first year of coach pitch baseball. Do you know how hard it is to throw strikes to seven and eight year olds? Thank goodness we had another coach who did the pitching!! One of the refrains of the season the players heard from us coaches was "keep your eye on the ball." In other words, watch the ball so you can hit it with your bat. Often times kids would swing so hard they would pull their head and be looking at the moon or they would be swinging and looking down at their feet. Nine times out of ten when they did not keep their eye on the ball they would strike out or just foul the ball off if they were lucky.
That refrain to "keep your eye on the ball" is a refrain that has been playing in my head as it pertains to following Jesus. It occurs to me that as followers of Jesus our job is to keep our eye on the ball. In this case, to keep our eyes on Jesus. It is when we take our eyes off of Jesus that we stumble. When we take our eyes off of Jesus we strike out in life or at best hit foul balls. However, when we keep our eye on Jesus we will follow in his way and be obedient to his teachings marking the way of life for us. Keeping our eye on Jesus is necessarily all the time, but especially in the difficult times, the times of stress, the times when Jesus seems most far away to us. It is those times we especially have to remember to "keep our eye on the ball" and hear the refrain "keep your eye on Jesus."
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