Bowling Bawl

She is running a hundred miles an hour

In the wrong direction

She is trying but the canyon’s ever widening

In the depths of her cold heart

So she sets out on another misadventure just to find

She’s another two years older and she’s three more steps behind

This is the theme song for Jamie, Years 2006-2009.  One of the few activities that suspended my life then was bowling alleys.

After a year of absence, I filed into Billy Hardwick’s last night, settled into a pair of nines, and began bowling.

In many ways, bowling is an allegory of life.  There are times you strike, many times you don’t; days you sit as an audience, merely watching others play; and sometimes even instances where balls fly completely in the wrong direction, missing the pins entirely.

It happened again last night, which isn’t unusual for me.  I do this about once every game.  I pulled back, lost my grip on the ball, and it shot quickly behind me and landed with an embarrassing thud.

At times I find myself in that same precarious predicament.  As much as I want to and am even destined to soar down that alley, sometimes I rocket backwards with a heavy, defeated thud.

Tastes, smells, feelings.  Some all too familiar senses flood my sensory and I’m back, back to being who I was then.  It is all too easy to fall back into being that person.  The bitterness of sin is masked by an alluring sweetness.  Self-serving, self-fulfilling.

At this moment, I am fighting with some old urges.

Today at church Dave Ruff spoke.  I know it was a message directly intended for me, because the verse he focused on Jeremiah 2:13:

For my people have committed two evils:

  They have forsaken Me,

   The fountain of living waters,

  To hew out for themselves cisterns,

   Broken cisterns

   That can hold no water.

I have spent my entire life betting on broken cisterns.  I’ve attempted to fill the void, but it’s only a temporary fill, and soon I am drained again.

In a life full of precarious predicaments, is it possible that instead of aiming for the pins, we should be aiming for salt?

One of the many books Scott has lent me is this study on the chapter of James.  In it, Christians are compared to salt.  There are three purposeful qualities in the comparison:

1. The whiteness of salt is associated with purity.  Likewise, Christians are supposed to be examples of purity.
2. Then it was used as a preservative to keep food from spoiling.  Our influence should protect against moral corruption.
3. Salt lends flavor to bland foods—the way Christians are to add spice to a spiritually bland world.

If you lose your grip and fall, let the notion of salt lay as padding to shield you and bring you back to the path that God predestined for you.

He loves you, and living a life of obedience is how we can best return God’s love.