I want to say welcome to all of you in the room who are joining us. Welcome to everyone joining us

online. We're so glad you're here. Thanks for spending your Sunday with us. My name is Clay, if we

haven't had the chance to meet. I am a pastor on staff here, and something else you should know about me is that I love

baseball. Do we have any baseball fans in the house? Yeah, go Braves. Yeah, they're doing pretty well right now. Anybody play

baseball growing up? Yeah, play. Anybody coach baseball? Coach your kids right now. Anybody spending

hours traveling to travel ball tournaments where parents yell at each other and yell at the umps?

Yeah, anybody that parent? No, you don't have to be that honest. I'm just kidding. I legitimately missed those days, though, when I was traveling and playing baseball. They were some of the most fun days of my life. I don't necessarily miss the parents raging, but I miss playing. And I have a 10-month-old son right now that I can't wait until he is able to play baseball, and we can get him in that. And if you're in that season right now, I hope you enjoy it.

Don't forget about it.

Don't try to rush through it.

I hope you enjoy it because this season, like every season, ultimately will eventually

come to an end.

Actually, all seasons eventually come to an end.

I can vividly remember my baseball career starting to come to an end. I was a senior

in high school. I was trying to figure out what college I was going to go to. Do I want to continue

trying to pursue this dream of playing baseball for my entire life? Do I want to try to make this

a career and try to make this something that I can do. And in order to do

that, I was going to have to go to a small school because I wasn't good enough to go to a big school. I thought I was pretty good, but not good enough to get recruited by the big ones. And so it was like, do I continue trying to move down this path and maybe keep doing the practices and the tryouts and all the things and try to move down that path?

Or do I make a change and go to a bigger school?

Do I go to a big SEC school and maybe start figuring out what's next for me? What is my career going to be? What could I be interested in? What am I going to do next? And so I started to wrestle with this. It was challenging. I didn't know what I wanted to do.

And now looking back, what I realized is the reason it was so difficult is because I wasn't

just choosing a college, I was actually choosing whether a season that I deeply loved was

going to end.

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