on golf and God

God bless anyone even thinking about asking me what the Masters was like. I may or may not have a problem over-sharing about that whole experience.

In one of my recent over-sharing episodes, I was going on incessantly about where we stationed our chairs, and which positions on the course offered the best views of the greens, the fairways, the tee boxes.

As I learned, there's quite a strategy involved in making those decisions, and if you're not accompanied by a seasoned Masters patron, you might not see much golf at all.

I was fortunate to have that luxury, though, and I did see almost every golfer on the course, at one point or another. I saw a lot of solid putts. Some calculated chip shots. Several approach shots flying out of the woods.

But I didn't see any of the glamour, go-down-in-history shots.

You know the ones that ESPN shows over and over and over again, for years? The ones that make the crowds go wild?

Didn't see a one.

And it wasn't because they weren't happening.

Think about this. There are around 90 contenders, playing 18 holes a day, some of those for two days, some for four days, hitting up to ten shots per hole (it happened, sadly). There are a lot of shots happening at Augusta National, over a sweeping expanse of green.

Somewhere hidden in the thousands of ordinary strokes, though, are the miracle shots. And some people get to see them, because they happen to be at the right place, on the right day, watching the right pairing, when that one guy hits the shot that makes history.

I think this is how God's story is told.

It took me a long, long time to understand that the Bible is one big story, made up of a lot of little stories. It's a lot of places, and times, and people -- usually ordinary people, in fact, going about the business of every day living -- that together tell that one, great big story of redemption.

Granted, it's not luck that determines where we settle in to this adventure. I believe God to be intentionally sovereign over the times and places in which he sets every person, and I believe he's capable of performing wonders for any person to experience.

But we won't see every miracle shot.

And not because they're not happening.

He just wants us to know, imagine, trust, and love his story, and be giddy at the invitation to be included in it at all.