Not really about baseball...

...it's just the platform from which to tell the story.

I've been to 4 Cubs vs. Cardinals games, spread over several years, at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. No matter if they're having a winning season or not (and yes, it's been "not" more often than I care to acknowledge), the Cubs have a track record of beating the Cardinals the majority of the time on the Cards' home turf. It's an indisputable, statistical fact that even Cardinal fans have to admit.

And just to prove my bad luck, the Cubs lost the last 3 games I saw. But I went Saturday fully expecting a victory. The Cubs have held the #1 position in their division for most of the season and they've statistically outranked every other team in MLB for nearly all of that time. And, until the very bottom of the 9th inning (actually, the last 10 seconds of the game), I was confident I was about to break my "losing streak" and witness a victory. But the Cubs lost. I watched it all happen and still can't believe my eyes.

And this really ISN'T about baseball.

The Cubs and Cardinals played a 3-game series--Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The Cubs won Friday and Sunday. I didn't see those games. I didn't see them win, but I know they did. I didn't see them win, but I know they're a winning team. I've never seen them beat the Cardinals, but I know they do...almost all of the time.

And crazy as it may seem, this reminded me of the verse in Hebrews that talks about faith...when we have faith, we KNOW when something's real, even if we don't witness it with our own eyes. I've had a lot of challenges to my faith lately...and not just my faith in God, but essentially, it all points right back at God.

I never lost faith that I had a kick-ass printer (see the previous post), even though I had trouble getting it configured to work with my computer. I still have faith that there are decent, "dateable" men out there somewhere, even though I've encountered several that make me want to join a convent. I've not lost faith that marriage can be an amazing thing, even though...well, never mind--TMI alert going off there. ;-) And I've not lost faith in other believers, even though some need to have "Christ-follower" tattooed on their foreheads so I can recognize them for what they claim to be.

And if I can still have faith in fallible things like printers and men and Christians and the Chicago Cubs, even when they break and lie and cheat and lose because there's some small evidence (and a LOT of hope) that they will work and speak truth and be faithful and win, then I know I can have faith in a God who, unseen though he may be, just keeps inundating me with evidence that he's real.