Use It or Lose It

            It was with some sadness that I read a few weeks ago that my hometown of Delmont will not field an amateur baseball team this year.

            I knew this would come sometime.  Delmont is getting smaller, as are many of our small towns.  The school joined with Tripp quite a few years ago.  They stopped fielding youth baseball teams a while back.  With no young people coming up, it was only a matter of time until the guys who’d been playing got too old to continue to do so.

            It still makes me sad, though.  I think the saddest thing of all is to think of the Delmont ballpark falling into disrepair.  It was never a great ballpark, but it was pretty good for a little town.  It hosted a lot of district baseball tournaments over the years.  When I was growing up, a lot of my summer life revolved around that ballpark.  At various times, I played, I umpired, I ran the scoreboard (first manual, then electronic), I kept the scorebook, I did some public address announcing.  It makes me sad to think that, in years to come, that ballpark that was so much a part of my life will continue to look shabbier and shabbier.

            That shabbiness is not inevitable, of course.  There’s nothing to stop people from mowing it and raking it and keeping it up.  The chances are, though, that it won’t happen.  One of the rules of life seems to be “use it or lose it.”  With no teams actually playing in that ballpark, the chances of anyone keeping it in good shape are pretty small.

            “Use it or lose it” applies to a lot of things in life.  If we don’t exercise our muscles, we’ll lose them.  If we don’t exercise our skills, we’ll lose them, too.

            I think “use it or lose it” also applies to our faith.  That’s why I think it’s important to pray regularly.  That’s why I think it’s important to go to church regularly.  These are ways we can exercise our faith.

            Why is important to exercise our faith?  Well, why is it important to exercise our muscles?  We don’t exercise our muscles just for the sake of exercising.  We exercise them so, when we need those muscles, we’ll have them.  It’s the same way with our skills.  We don’t exercise our skills just for the sake of it.  We exercise them so, when we need them, we have them.

            Our faith works the same way, too.  We don’t exercise our faith just for the sake of it.  We exercise our faith so, when we need our faith, we have it.

            Life can be hard sometimes.  No matter how good things seem to be, we’re all going to hit rough spots.  When we do, we’ll find out what kind of shape our faith is in.  If we’ve been exercising our faith regularly, we’ll find that it’s there when we need it, and it will help carry us through those tough times.  If we haven’t been exercising our faith regularly, well, we’re going to find out that we don’t have it to fall back on when we need it.  It’s not that God won’t be there for us; it’s that we won’t believe that we can trust God, because we haven’t been exercising our faith the way we should.

            Any time something is not used, it gets lost.  Keep your faith in good shape.  That way, when you need it, it’ll be there.