Surely you’ve seen the movie “The Sandlot.” It’s the story of a group of kids that spend their days playing baseball together. My favorite line from that movie comes from the great Hamilton Porter who, in frustration, shouts to his friend, “You’re killin me, Smalls!” But there’s another line that I want to talk about. It’s when Benny is trying to prove that the new neighborhood kid, Scotty, is good enough for the team by letting him catch a fly ball. Benny tells him, “Just stand out there and stick your glove in the air. I’ll take care of it.” And the ball falls perfectly into Scotty’s glove.
Recently, one of our twins, Amos, was trying to do just that…catch a fly ball. The ball soared in the air, Amos stood and stuck out his glove, and the ball glanced off of his glove and into his lip. Hollywood definitely wrote a better story. He did take it like a champ. No tears. No weeping and gnashing of teeth. Though he did want his Mom, which is understandable.
Anyway, as I sat there with Amos, who had an ice pack to his lip, I was thinking about how parents are sometimes helpless to make things better for their kids. You can bandage the hurt. You can wipe away the tears, but you can’t keep them from experiencing pain. If you could, you would protect them from all the hurts, physical and otherwise, but that’s just not possible. That’s what makes the love of God so astonishing. God, instead of preventing the suffering of his Son, willingly sent him to die on our behalf! It was “his will to crush him and cause him to suffer” (Is. 53:10). How great the love of God toward us that he would send his beloved Son to experience the pain that we all deserved. Truly he is worthy of our worship and praise.
