Field of Fever Dreams

Jesus tells a story in Matthew 25 about three servants. If you grew up in church, you know it. It’s the parable of the talents. The short version goes like this: 

There’s a rich master and he’s leaving on a trip, a long trip. He gives out money to three of his servants. One gets five talents. One gets three. The last one gets one talent. Let’s not get caught up on amounts for now. Then the master leaves. The first two servants go out to the market and double their money. It doesn’t say how long it takes them to do it. They just do it. They double the master’s money. The third one goes a different way. He buries his talent in the ground and waits for his master to come home. The master gets back and he’s talking to these three about what they did with his money in his absence. The first two tell him about how they doubled his money. He says to both of them separately, “Well done my good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your master.” He gets to the third one and that servant says, “I knew you to be a hard man, blah blah blah. So I hid your talent in the ground. See here it is. You have what is yours.” The master calls him wicked and lazy, gives him a quick lesson on interest, and sends him out to the dark where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. 

I’ve been thinking about this more and more lately, because I know I’m not working in my purpose. I don’t always believe that your 9-5 should be explicitly connected to your purpose. But I do believe that you should be working on something that lines up with the deep calling you feel in your soul. 

I know I’m not doing that where I am now. I know I’m not using my gifts here. 

I’m using a variation of my gifts. Or I’m using them in a way that doesn’t align with my soul. It’s like using a baseball bat as a rolling pin. Can you do it? Sure. Is it what it’s made for? Not at all. It knows it was built to hit home runs, call shots, be signed and given to the loyal batboy who one day dreams of playing in the big leagues. But instead you’re rolling dough. Making rolls in the back of a Texas Roadhouse so some kid and her family can slather them in cinnamon butter at her birthday dinner before she sits on the saddle and takes a picture with a waitress. Your gift is out of place. Everyone is looking at you weird because you brought a baseball bat to a kitchen like you’re a new member of the local Cosa Nostra collecting “rent” from the Texas Roadhouse franchise owner. 

But really you’re just a guy in a kitchen standing awkwardly over the bread station with a baseball bat. You’re contorting your body in weird ways because that space wasn’t made to accommodate 42” of engineered hickory wood. It was made for awkward teenagers holding plastic rolling pins. But here you are with your bat, using it for something so far below its station, so far below your station. 

And you're bitter because your back hurts from the way you have to stand all day rolling dough with your bat. You're bitter because you know you don’t belong here. You’re bitter because of the flour and dough that’s worked its way into the cracks of the bat. You’re bitter because there’s cracks in the bat and you know that one day, maybe soon, it won’t be any good for hitting balls. It will be worn and old, and one day it will break from the constant pressure of continuous rolling. Then you’ll tell everyone in the kitchen that it used to be a great bat. Your dad gave it to you. Your dad even taught you to hit with it. 

But you were too much of a coward to ever step up to the plate. So you stepped up to the bread station. Everyone is tired of hearing your stories. You’re tired of telling them. You’re bitter from telling them. You’re bitter from explaining the bat to all the new people who cycle through the kitchen. You’re bitter because you carried it into your job interview and acted like it was a rolling pin. You even convinced your boss it was a rolling pin. You’re starting to believe it was made to be a rolling pin. 

But you keep working there. Your boss likes you. He says you’re actually one of the best bread guys they’ve ever had. Sure you have a weird rolling pin that you bring from home even though the restaurant would happily supply you with your own, but that doesn’t seem to matter because the restaurant is selling more rolls than ever before. So keep up the good work, buddy. That thing really does look like a baseball bat, though. 

At night you go home and put it back on its place above the mantle. You take a shower to wash off the flour, dough, sweat and shame. You sit down and turn on the game. You watch other men swing and miss, and swing and connect. You know you could do it, too. You might even be able to do it better.

The bat thinks you could, too. It longs to be pulled down off the mantle and taken to a field, any field. The one down the street from your apartment would be good enough. You drive by it every night on your way home. It doesn’t even need a pitcher. It doesn’t even need a crowd (though they would be blessed to watch it swing). It just needs a bucket of old, worn Rawlings balls and enough light to see the fence line.

It longs to feel the rough skin of your right hand and the smooth leather of the glove on your left. The short gust of wind as your hips rotate, followed by your shoulders, then your hands bringing the barrel around to connect with an old ball from the bucket. It’s dying to punish that ball for sitting in that bucket for so long. It can’t wait to be flipped toward the empty dugout where a group of snot-nosed 9-year olds were sitting just 12 hours earlier. It wants to watch you run the bases of an empty field at 10:24pm on a Saturday when everyone else is out drinking. It wants you to feel connected to what it is and what it could be, what you could be, at least for tonight.  

But you’ve buried it in flour and dough and butter. The logo is starting to rub off. Your boss got mad once because you sent a batch of rolls out with the word “Slugger” emblazoned on all of them and everyone in the restaurant started asking if the owner did some kind of brand deal with Louisville. He didn’t. You just did a bad job of showing that it wasn’t really a bat. 

What will you do when your dad comes back and asks you what you did with the bat he gave you? 

Will you tell him you used it for everything it was worth? That you walked up to every plate in every field you were invited to and swung as hard as you could no matter how scared you were? Or will you tell him the truth? That you hid in the back of a Texas Roadhouse making rolls with it because you never really believed?

If you made it this far and this spoke to you in any way, I’d love to hear from you. Send me an email at sheep@sheepish.life. I read all of them.