Finding Hope

There was a period of time when Stephanie and I watched a lot of baseball games. Countless baseball games. Our son, Taylor, started with T-ball when he was five years old and didn’t stop until the end of the American Legion season the summer after his freshman year in college. The older he got, the more games he played. He played in all kinds of weather, from freezing cold to unbearably hot. Regular season games, postseason tournaments, all-star travel teams. If I could reverse time, I’d go back to all of it without a second thought.

I’m thinking about all of those games because there was an all-star tournament in Uvalde, Texas this past weekend. Yes, the same Uvalde that just experienced the horror of a mass shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers. For a few days, the adults who run the Uvalde Little League considered not hosting the tournament. Then they decided it was exactly what they needed. Something joyful. Something normal. Boys and girls who lost teammates in the shooting played baseball and softball against teams from all over the region.

It is so easy right now to focus on the multitude of problems in our society, to see only the darkness. It’s easy to fall into despair, to wonder if we’ve slipped too far to recover our equilibrium. Where do we find hope?

Perhaps, at least for this week, we need look no further than a baseball and softball tournament in Uvalde. The organizers, the coaches, the players, their parents and the community did not come together pretending as if tragedy had not forever changed their lives. They remembered those who were killed. They honored their parents and families. They wept.

And then they played. They pitched, hit, ran the bases and worked as a team. They cheered for each other and celebrated victories. They played with what must have been a defiant joy and a nearly impossible hope. It’s as if they shook their fist at the darkness of the world and proclaimed they would live their lives as fully as possible in this moment. They refused to let the darkness win.

We can learn a great deal from their example.

“In these days that seem to be so dark,” the great civil rights leader and icon, John Lewis, told Margaret Renkl, “I think the spirit of history is still leading us and guiding us — I believe in that. Call it what you may, but I believe that somehow, in some way, good is going to prevail. And out of some of the darkest hours, there will be daybreak. There will be light. And we will get there. You have to believe it. You have to believe in your guts that it’s going to be OK.” (From an essay in Graceland, At Last by Margaret Renkl).