Although I occasionally mention the Red Sox in my blog, I don’t think I’ve ever written a full post about the Sox. But over the past few days there have been a few things that jumped out at me & thought there were a few things to learn…

Things are not always what they appear…
For most of the season the Red Sox were an amazing machine.  I was driving home from my parents home in September, listening to the Sox beating up on the Blue Jays 14-0. The post game talk (Toronto station) was how horrible the Jays were, but also how unstoppable the Sox had become.

Yesterday we learned from the manager that he held a team meeting shortly after that game, because he saw some problems that concerned him.

I’ll use churches as an example, but it applies for many areas of life…we look at the numbers…the finances, the attendance, is there a ‘buzz?” and then decide whether things are good or bad. And not that you are not right sometimes…just sometimes we get distracted by unimportant stuff, and miss what is going on at a deeper level. Be careful before you judge to quickly.

take a deep breath…
One thing I was hoping would not happen after all this was Francona getting fired. While I love to yell at the TV set while he’s managing & think I could do better. But every move he pulls that goes wrong, I remind myself, we have 2 world series titles in the past 7 years because of him. Edwin Friedman in his book, A Failure of Nerve talks about the problem of reactivity (or lizard  brain as Seth Godin calls it in Linchpin). This idea that something has gone wrong and someone has to pay.  We don’t care who…just somebody. We do the same thing every two years in November as we decide to “throw the bums out,” and then wonder why nothing in Washington ever gets done.

The Red Sox Players (at least some of them quit). And while perhaps Francona decided he didn’t need the stress of working in Boston anymore…if he was fired for the past 30 days of this season…that seems like a pretty reactive, and pretty short-sighted (stupid) decision.

God does not want the Red Sox in the playoffs..
Although not nearly as big as the Yankees, the Red Sox have a huge payroll.  The player on the team that gets more of that money than anyone eles is  Adrian Gonzalez. And he has been amazing to watch this year.

But what we’ve just learned is that we don’t need to pay him…we can go out and get a group of  minor leaguers, save our money and they are just as likely to go the playoffs as anyone else…In fact, it was Gonzalez, who clued us in to this. Here are his two quotes after the Red Sox epic failure:

“I’m a firm believer that God has a plan and it wasn’t in his plan for us to move forward,”

“God didn’t have it in the cards for us… For me, I’m a firm believer in God and God has a plan and it wasn’t in God’s plan for us to be in the playoffs.”

My head hurts. It wasn’t because we played horrible…it was God not wanting us in the playoffs.

Why to Christians do stuff like that? Do we think is sounds profound, spiritual & deep rather that trite, silly and just a lame way to excuse my actions.

“I’m sorry boss, I didn’t get the project done you wanted me to have finished…guess God didn’t want it to get finished.”

My 17 year old daughter Hannah is going to be part of the worship team a the haunt. She plays electric guitar. After the first practice, 2 people told me that Hannah was the most prepared musician there that night. When I asked her about it, she said,”I know if you are the youngest person you have to work twice as hard to prove yourself.”

I think there is a lesson in there.

That is the end of my venting for today…

Go Tigers!