God - Doing His Thing

God Doing His Thing
Two Novembers ago I met a woman in Laguna Beach at a Hope International event that was bring awareness to providing micro lending to entrepreneurs in third world countries. In my conversation with her it came up that I had played baseball professionally for 9 years and was recently transitioning into business. She mentioned that she had a son who played varsity at Laguna Beach High School and he was a pitcher. I politely extended an offer to work with her son and give him some instruction. She was thankful for the invitation and took down my phone number however I never heard from her. Almost a year later I get a call from a father who I had met 1 time in my life at a 10 year old travel teams baseball practice. He was very nice and extremely likable so when he called I instantly remembered him. He asked if I was coaching and I said no, he asked if I had any interest and I replied that I did but didn’t have an ounce of time because I was busy building my business and spending time with my growing family. He invited me to coffee so I took him up on it. I showed up to coffee and he was there with the head varsity baseball coach and they politely cornered me and asked what time if any I could give them. I stretched myself to say 2 hours a week, 1 hour on 2 different days (Monday and Tuesday). I went on to add that if this in any way affected my commitments to my family and business I’d have to bow out. They jumped at the offer with two huge smiles and gave me a hug. Just to help drive home this situation, every varsity program has a full time pitching coach and most have 3 coaches here in Southern California. The fact that they were excited out 2 hours from me blew my mind. Fast forward 5 or 6 months I’ve been working with the kids for 5 months and they are an awesome bunch. I can tell that they are very well parented and all of them are hungry for instruction and show me tremendous respect. They take a team trip to Hawaii for the preseason and pay for my wife and I to go (extremely generous). Christy is thrilled and I’m excited but worry about leaving work for 5 days. We get over to the Island and we’re short pitching due to injuries. On the second day we already used up 75% of our guys and we’re only half way into our games. Needless to say I need somebody to step up and throw a lot of innings and be conservative with their pitches which can be tough with teenagers. I get an unbelievable outing from one of my favorite kids who had never pitched 3 innings before. He battles so tough for 6 innings we had a heartfelt moment after the inning and I hugged him because I was so proud of him. Days later we were boarding the plane to go home and a mother came up to me and said “Ben, I’ve met you before, I met you at 3 Arch Bay in Laguna Beach for the Hope International event. My heart sputtered as I realized that God had orchestrated this detailed plan to get me to coach this team and influence these kids. I was blown away by His power and grace. The fact that God is using me and the way in which He has done it blows my mind. How great is our God? I hope you all enjoyed this story as much as I did realizing it. Praise to the king!