We Are Not Machines

I took the day off of work today and am going to a Mets vs. Dodgers game with my wife.  It’s an exciting little date we have snuck into our schedules, and we’re going to have a lot of fun.  The only problem is that the Dodgers haven’t been doing so well.

It’s perplexing really.  To look at the statistics (when you’re talking about baseball you always have to look at the statistics), the Dodgers are playing awful.  There’s no real way around it.  I just watched them loose a doubleheader last night and they may well again lose today.  If they did they would deserve it.  Out of their many problems, the one that is most glaring this year is the amount of errors they have had: 21 errors in 20 games.  They are averaging slightly more than one error per game!  All this after a year last year when they had 83 errors all season last year.

The weird thing is that the team has only one different starting fielder than they did last year.  So what’s to account for the change from an average of 0.5 errors per game to over 1 error per game?  Who knows…

The lesson here is that we’re not machines.  None of us are.  We can’t duplicate things year after year.  Circumstances change, like in baseball when no one knows where the ball is going to go until it’s in play.  The Dodgers could be really bad fielders overnight or it could just be bad luck and bad timing.  Who knows…

We can’t get the idea in our heads that we can keep going doing the same thing forever and the results will always be the same.  Time changes and we need the wisdom to discern what is wrong and how to work through all the bad bounces and bad throws in our life.  We cause some errors and some errors just come our way.  What to do with the errors is the harder part.

I don’t pretend to know all the answers to life’s dilemmas.  We can pray and fast—it works sometimes.  Sometimes it doesn’t, at least not in the ways we understand.  There is an irreducible complexity to life that is just best left to mystery.  So we need to enter the mystery of life with wisdom, admitting that life changes and circumstances change, that life can become harder or easier in a moments notice, and that we aren’t machines that just go about life humming along like everything is always the same and it will always be that way.