pastorwardclinton.com
pastorwardclinton.com
Worth the read… For everyone especially parents and coaches
In Nashville, Tennessee, during the first week of January, 1996, more than 4,000 baseball coaches descended upon the Opryland Hotel for the 52nd annual ABCA convention.
While I waited in line to register with the hotel staff, I heard other more veteran coaches rumbling about the lineup of speakers scheduled to present during the weekend. One name, in particular, kept resurfacing, always with the same sentiment — “John Scolinos is here? Oh man, worth every penny of my airfare.”
Who the heck is John Scolinos, I wondered. Well, in 1996 Coach Scolinos was 78 years old and five years retired from a college coaching career that began in 1948. No matter, I was just happy to be there.
He shuffled to the stage to an impressive standing ovation, wearing dark polyester pants, a light blue shirt, and a string around his neck from which home plate hung — a full-sized, stark-white home plate. Pointed side down.
Seriously, I wondered, who in the hell is this guy?
After speaking for twenty-five minutes, not once mentioning the prop hanging around his neck, Coach Scolinos appeared to notice the snickering among some of the coaches. Even those who knew Coach Scolinos had to wonder exactly where he was going with this, or if he had simply forgotten about home plate since he’d gotten on stage.
Then, finally …
“You’re probably all wondering why I’m wearing home plate around my neck. Or maybe you think I escaped from Camarillo State Hospital,” he said, his voice growing irascible. I laughed along with the others, acknowledging the possibility.
“No,” he continued, “I may be old, but I’m not crazy. The reason I stand before you today is to share with you baseball people what I’ve learned in my life, what I’ve learned about home plate in my 78 years.”
Several hands went up when Scolinos asked how many Little League coaches were in the room. “Do you know how wide home plate is in Little League?” After a pause, someone offered, “Seventeen inches,” more question than answer.
“That’s right,” he said. “How about in Babe Ruth? Any Babe Ruth coaches in the house?”
Another long pause.
“Seventeen inches?”came a guess from another reluctant coach.
“That’s right,” said Scolinos. “Now, how many high school coaches do we have in the room?” Hundreds of hands shot up, as the pattern began to appear. “How wide is home plate in high school baseball?”
“Seventeen inches,” they said, sounding more confident.
“You’re right!” Scolinos barked. “And you college coaches, how wide is home plate in college?”
“Seventeen inches!” we said, in unison.
“Any Minor League coaches here? How wide is home plate in pro ball?”
“Seventeen inches!”
“RIGHT! And in the Major Leagues, how wide home plate is in the Major Leagues?”
“Seventeen inches!”
“SEV-EN-TEEN INCHES!” he confirmed, his voice bellowing off the walls.
“And what do they do with a a Big League pitcher who can’t throw the ball over these seventeen inches?” Pause. “They send him to Pocatello!” he hollered, drawing raucous laughter.
“What they don’t do is this: they don’t say, ‘Ah, that’s okay, Bobby. You can’t hit a seventeen-inch target? We’ll make it eighteen inches, or nineteen inches. We’ll make it twenty inches so you have a better chance of throwing the ball over it. If you can’t hit that, let us know so we can make it wider still, say twenty-five inches.’”
Pause.
“Coaches …”
Pause.
” … what do we do when our best player shows up late to practice? What do we do if he violates curfew? What if he uses drugs? Do we hold him accountable? Or do we change the rules to fit him? Do we widen home plate?
The chuckles gradually faded as four thousand coaches grew quiet, the fog lifting as the old coach’s message began to unfold.
Then he turned the plate toward himself and, using a Sharpie, began to draw something. When he turned it toward the crowd, point up, a house was revealed, complete with a freshly drawn door and two windows. “This is the problem in our homes today. With our marriages, with the way we parent our kids. With our discipline. We don’t teach accountability to our kids, and there is no consequence for failing to meet standards. We widen the plate!”
Pause. Then, to the point at the top of the house he added a small American flag.
“This is the problem in our schools today. The quality of our education is going downhill fast and teachers have been stripped of the tools they need to be successful….to educate and discipline our young people. We are allowing others to widen home plate! Where is that getting us?”
“And this is the problem in the Church, where powerful people in positions of authority have taken advantage of young children, only to have such an atrocity swept under the rug for years. Our church leaders are widening home plate!”
I was amazed. At a baseball convention where I expected to learn something about curveballs and bunting and how to run better practices, I had learned something far more valuable. From an old man with home plate strung around his neck, I had learned something about life, about myself, about my own weaknesses and about my responsibilities as a leader. I had to hold myself and others accountable to that which I knew to be right, lest our families, our faith, and our society continue down an undesirable path.
“If I am lucky,” Coach Scolinos concluded, “you will remember one thing from this old coach today. It is this: if we fail to hold ourselves to a higher standard, a standard of what we know to be right; if we fail to hold our spouses and our children to the same standards, if we are unwilling or unable to provide a consequence when they do not meet the standard; and if our schools and churches and our government fail to hold themselves accountable to those they serve, there is but one thing to look forward to …”
With that, he held home plate in front of his chest, turned it around, and revealed its dark black backside.
“… dark days ahead.”
Coach Scolinos died in 2009 at the age of 91, but not before touching the lives of hundreds of players and coaches, including mine. Meeting him at my first ABCA convention kept me returning year after year, looking for similar wisdom and inspiration from other coaches. He is the best clinic speaker the ABCA has ever known because he was so much more than a baseball coach.
His message was clear: “Coaches, keep your players — no matter how good they are — your own children, and most of all, keep yourself at seventeen inches. (copied post)
pastorwardclinton.com
Certain people: (You know some of them; some are family and some of them you invite into your life by choices that you make) “We would be more comfortable in wanting to come around and associate with you if you were less disapproving of the things the Bible disapproves of.”
Me: “I keep remembering what I was taught early as a Christian that embracing and practicing Biblical teachings and obeying Biblical do’s and don’ts is the formula for successful living.
“You may go ahead and mess up your lives if you wish by rejecting the Word of God and the time-tested precepts contained therein. You may go ahead and call me a dangerous, unstable extremist for choosing to walk a different path than you as you falsely attempt to call yourself ‘tolerant.’
“There is something you should take notice of and that is the fact that the sages throughout the ages taught concepts and precepts that mirror the teachings of Jesus the Christ when correctly comprehended. Therefore, I shall continue to obey and follow the teachings and commands of the Creator of the universe and walk in His paths.”
pastorwardclinton.com
One of the biggest, most stubborn and costliest untruths of our time is the notion that the jihad waged by Arabs in the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Gaza against Jews in Israel is a national struggle of an indigenous people for independence.
No matter the facts, the lie persists to the tune of billions of dollars in international aid and political prestige, which makes it increasingly difficult for anyone involved to admit that the whole thing is nothing more than a propaganda stunt.
Unlike the fairy tale of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, everyone pretends to be blind and deaf when it is pointed out that the emperor is naked. In fact, if the emperor himself were to stand up and yell, ‘I am naked folks, go home!’ the crowd would go on complimenting his non-existent garments.
Last week the naked emperor did just that:
“Before the Balfour Promise, when the Ottoman rule [1517-1917] ended, Palestine’s political borders as we know them today did not exist, and there was nothing called a Palestinian people with a political identity as we know today”, historian Abd Al-Ghani admitted on official PA TV on November 1.
“Since Palestine’s lines of administrative division stretched from east to west and included Jordan and southern Lebanon, and like all peoples of the region [the Palestinians] were liberated from the Turkish rule and immediately moved to colonial rule, without forming a Palestinian people’s political identity.”
In 1917, says this Arab historian on official PA TV, there was no such thing as a Palestinian people. This statement amounts to saying that the whole narrative of an ‘indigenous Palestinian people’ was made up at a later point in time.
As Hamas Minister of the Interior and of National Security Fathi Hammad speaking on Al-Hekma TV said in March 2012: “Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis. Who are the Palestinians? We have many families called Al-Masri, whose roots are Egyptian. Egyptian! They may be from Alexandria, from Cairo, from Dumietta, from the North, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians…”
There is a reason, why the “Palestinian National Museum” is empty of historical artifacts.
The Arab historian’s admission corroborates the observations of 19th century travelers to the region, who notably had no specific political agenda when they visited, unlike so many visitors to Israel today:
”Outside the gates of Jerusalem, we saw indeed no living object, heard no living sound”, wrote French poet Alphonse de Lamartine about his visit in 1835.
”The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population.” wrote British Consul James Finn in his 1857 description of the Holy Land.
”Palestine sits in a sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that withered its fields and fettered its energies. …Palestine is desolate and unlovely….It is a hopeless dreary, heartbroken land.” wrote American author Mark Twain in his description of his visit in 1867.
Nevertheless, the Arab propaganda machine gets away with publishingfantastic falsehoods, such as this one on the Palestinian Authority’s tourism website: “With a history that envelops more than one million years, Palestine has played an important role in human civilization. The crucible of prehistoric cultures, it is where settled society, the alphabet, religion, and literature developed, and would become a meeting place for diverse cultures and ideas that shaped the world we know today”.
The international community not only approves of these falsehoods, it happily pays for them.
Historian Abd Al-Ghani’s declaration on PA TV was a historic, highly newsworthy admission that ought to have made the headlines everywhere, considering the importance the issue is given by political leaders, diplomats, the media and other establishment figures all over the world.
After all, if the Arabs themselves admit that the ‘Palestinian people’ is an invented entity, should not the consequence be that the countless UN projects, billions of dollars in international aid, and the endless campaigns against Israel cease and be used for more noble purposes?
The answer is yes, but no one is paying attention.
We live in a post-factual world. Facts no longer have any currency, unlike feelings and ideological posturing. The truth has been reduced to a troublesome inconvenience and if it happens to stare you in the face, nothing could be easier than closing your eyes or simply looking away.
____________________
Judith Bergman is a columnist and political analyst
“The notion that the State should do that which is explicitly (and purposefully) reserved for the family and the church has become so normal after generations of State-run children’s mind-sculpting that most professing Christians in the land don’t even recognize this profound problem as a problem.
Ask a typical evangelical American – including most “leaders” within the church – whether State-run mind-molding of children should be acceptable within a Christian worldview and you’re likely to hear some version of: “But I went to public school and turned out just fine, so obviously it’s okay to send kids to public schools.”
When someone gives you that answer – or any of its numerous variants – you know that you are speaking with a thoroughly programmed disciple of the State who is so thoroughly programmed that they don’t even see it as programming…which is, of course, the end-product goal of State-run children’s education.”
–Scott Alan Buss
Follow the anti-2nd Amendment crowd and you will get farther away from Eden. This young lady is showing the way to go back a little closer to Eden.
pastorwardclinton 