Robby Prenkert

It occurred to me this morning at breakfast

Split a double header last night.  Lost 8-2 in our first game.  Scored 2 in the first and then gave up 6 in the bottom of the first.  Only got 3 hits all game.  In the second game we were down 2-0 going into the bottom of the seventh.  We managed 3 bunt singles, a hit by pitch, and a two run single to win 3-2.  We discovered a weakness.

We won 7-6 in nine innings on Thursday, our first league victory at last (1-3).  I played second base for a while, which is nice.  You have to be so much less “perfect” there than at shortstop.  I switched to shortstop 10 years ago or so, and I won’t be all that sad when I no longer play there.  I’m a center fielder, really, who is capable of playing middle infield.

2/5.

 Not much to say about this one.
We gave up 7 runs in the first inning of both games in our double header and never got going after that.  Pitching fail to start, offensive fail after that.  L 11-1, L 8-0.
At least it was a nice night.

Irony = let’s simulate a school shooter so we can prepare for something that will very likely never happen.  But today, let’s go ahead and have school even though we got a foot of snow overnight.

We lost our first league game 3-4 to Trinity Green.  We played fairly well defensively, and they probably helped us out with a few botched plays in the field.  But most importantly, the temperature was reasonable and I felt comfortable playing.  Note to self: no more 40 degree games for me.  2/4 3B.

Smalltown Fastpitch * Early Bird Tournament (May 11-12)* Coldwater, MI

With temparatures consistently in the 40s all weekend and a frigid wind much of the time, our first tournament came off without my getting frostbite or seriously injured.  So I count that a victory.

Game 1:  Smalltown 4  Hastings Blues 5
After taking the lead in the top of the seventh, we walked the leadoff man in the bottom of the inning and the next batter crushed a high, inside pitch over the 290+ foot fence in left.  (1/4 3B)

Game 2: Smalltown 10 Westerville Capitals 4
Back on a real fastpitch field, we managed to hit a couple homeruns and beat a good, young Canadian pitcher.  (2/4 BB)

Game 3: Smalltown 20 Wabash 9
The wind picked up after a brief rain storm and the temperature managed to drop, but somehow we ground out this slugfest anyhow launching six homers in six innings.  I got plunked twice and walked twice and scored four times.  (0-1)

Game 4:  Smalltown 4 Thunder 11
After scoring four first inning runs, we couldn’t manage another as the Thunder homered five times to beat us by the mercy rule in five innings.  One of the coldest mornings I’ve ever played softball.  (1/3)

I scored 8 runs on the weekend, walked 3 times, was hit twice, had a triple, and went a modest 4/12 (.333).  With my 43 year old creaking knees and worn out achilles', I’m not dissatisfied with the weekend.  But I know why there aren’t any everyday players in the major leagues my age.  It’s not that they can’t hit anymore, it’s that the first month and half of the season is played in nearly winter weather, and there comes a point when you just can’t stay loose enough to move.  Next game is Thursday in Benton Harbor.  I expect it to be warmer.

Season Record:  2-2

by Wendell Berry

"The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of Sabbath.  It is not an interlude but the climax of living."

"Let the Church remember this: that every maker and worker is called to serve God in his profession or trade--not outside it.  The Apostles complained rightly when they said it was not their meet [meant] they should leave the word of God and serve tables; their vocation was to preach the word. But the person whose vocation it is to prepare the meals beautifully might with equal justice protest: It is not meet for us to leave the service of our tables to preach the word.  The official Church wastes time and energy, and, moreover, commits sacrilege, in demanding that secular workers should neglect their proper vocation in order to do Christian work--by which she means ecclesiastical work.  The only Christian work is good work well done.  Let the church see to it that the workers are Christian people and do their work well, as to God: then all the work will be Christian work, whether it is Church embroidery, or sewage-farming."
 

"The greatest insult which a commercial age has offered to the worker has been to rob him of all interest in the end-product of the work and to force him to dedicate his life to making badly things which were not worth making."
 

Chapel for academic credit.  Attend chapel for two days of the week.  Meet for small group discussion with a faculty mentor on the third day.  Research paper and weekly reflection papers or online forum discussion posts required.  3 credits.

(Note: faculty mentor would get 1 hour of load credit).

I hope we all do understand that all this crap I write is unproofed first draft crap, written fast and furious when I have a few moments from all the other crap I gotta do.  We do understand that.  Don’t we?

Several years ago I discovered the most helpful little book on academic writing I’d ever seen.  It’s called They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing.  I loved the book for the ways it simplified–through the use of basic templates–how academic writing at its best, works.

My freshmen could read it and apply the concepts right away in their essays. The results were almost immediate as they began practicing the art of “starting with what ‘they say’” as a way of setting up what “I say”–that is, framing your own argument as a response to what others have said or might say.

I adopted the book solely because I thought it would help my students write better essays.  And it has.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that something deeper was perhaps subtly being communicated to my students through the book–something I’m guessing I responded to unconsciously when I first read it.  What the book actually encourages is the practice of virtues of humility and charity.  I listen to (or read) what others are saying; I summarize as clearly as I can what they say, playing the empathetic “believing game,"; and only then do I respond.

I think the authors of the book mean to encourage liberal minded civil discourse, and I’m certainly with them.  We need that.  But what I’ve come to recognize is this: civil discourse isn’t enough for me and for my Christian students.  Ours is a higher calling.  We must read and write lovingly.

Alan Jacobs' book A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love is a wonderfully dense, insightful book that I take is, in part, a call to charitable academic discourse.  It’s subtly that, and it’s also more than that.  Jacobs' suggests that if the great commandment includes loving neighbor as self, then as readers (or listeners) we may well have a responsibility to treat the books we read and their authors as neighbors.  “Love your neighbor as yourself,” right?  And who is my neighbor?

Perhaps it’s that book (or poem, or blog, or chapel address) or that author (or speaker) I’m inclined to think doesn’t really have that much to offer me.

What might reading and interpretation look like when governed by the law of neighbor love?  And what might my less than charitable or dismissive responses to some of the texts or authors I’ve read (or speakers I’ve heard) suggest to me about how far I have to go as a disciple of Christ who desires to be perfected in love?

Jacobs' book is well worth the effort it takes to read, and it is one I will come back to again over the years.

That is, if you count the two volumes as only one book.  Of course this is again a re-re-re-read (at least).

I quit facebook a couple months back, and I like some of my “friends” a lot better now that I don’t have to read their moronic status updates. 

I bet some of them like me better, now, too.

Actions, then, are called just and temperate when they are such as the just or the temperate man would do; but it is not the man who does these that is just and temperate, but the man who also does them as just and temperate men do them. It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.

But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves. (re-read)

One of my favorite passages from the book.

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.  If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal.  Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.  But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change.  It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.  The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.  The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. 

I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God's will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness.  It is like hiding the talent in a napkin and for much the same reason "I knew thee that thou wert a hard man."  Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness.  If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he as not.  We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour.  If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.
 

5 Rounds

15 pullups
20 situps
25 pushups
30 squats

12:10