Well, hello, my friends, and welcome to the Live Inspired podcast Monday morning moments with John

O'Leary.

We record these so that you and I can begin our days

and our weeks in awe and on fire with a burst of inspiration. I begin this one with a question for you.

Do you have what it takes to be a rail splitter? We'll come back to that. If you know anything

about my story, you know that baseballs carry a special meaning to me.

As a nine-year-old boy, burned and struggling with a very difficult recovery,

60 signed baseballs showed up one after another and taught that little boy how to write again.

Far more valuably, those baseballs taught me that when someone goes out of their way for someone else,

it is possible to make the impossible reality.

It's one of the lessons Jack Buck gave me, but he wasn't done.

Years later, when I graduated university and became the undeserving recipient of a priceless baseball,

this heirloom quality gift, the one that he received when he went into the Hall of Fame,

the significance of that gift and the generosity of the man who gave it, again, changed the trajectory of my life.

As a dad, watching all my kids, but in particular my baseball loving son,

Patrick, snagged foul balls, I was always impressed by how he showed up at the baseball games

with his glove. Four consecutive years in a row on a daddy trip with his father, my little boy, Patrick, bringing in a

baseball mitt and then ultimately leaving the baseball stadium with a baseball in it reminded me

of a childlike mindset that you are far more likely to catch a baseball if you have the

audacity to expect it, to bring a glove,

and to look for it. It seems that whenever a baseball shows up in my life it brings with it a lesson

to apply. Such was the case earlier this year when yet another baseball landed in my mailbox.

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