I have often heard it said that baseball is a sport of failure. If a player doesn’t get a hit two-thirds of the time, they are a hall-of-fame caliber hitter with a .333 batting average.

An amazing team that wins 100 games in a season, lost nearly 40% of their games (38.3%).

While baseball players tend to be superstitious perfectionists, they have to get used to things not working out — even when they do everything right.

Good on paper?

Maybe that’s one of the things I like so much about baseball. It’s wildly unpredictable. The better team doesn’t always win.

Many of us learn that the hard way, after our team has a fantastic off-season. They brought back the best players, signed some amazing free agents, and promoted some minor league players. They have a great mix of pitching, fielding, speed, and hitting. You look at the stats and think, “This is going to be a GREAT year!”

Then they start playing games. Some players get hurt. Others get into inexplicable slumps. A pitcher no one could figure out last year, is somehow very hittable this year.

And you look up on Labor Day and your team is ten games under .500, at the bottom of the division, and tied for the worst record in baseball — not that I’m speaking from experience or anything. How?, you mutter to yourself. How could this happen?

We fans try to find a reason—a bad trade, a curse, anything to make sense of it—but the explanation might be simpler.

Entropy

The other day, I looked up the difference between entropy and chaos, as one does.

Chaos assumes there is order to the world. Things are chaotic because we haven’t figured out the order yet.

Entropy, on the other hand, acknowledges that some things are naturally disordered. Sometimes stuff just doesn’t make sense.

You’ve been there, right?

At ’em balls

Watching the Mets the last week or so, it’s been remarkable to see how well second baseman Marcus Semien has been swinging. He had a ton of hard hit balls, but almost all of them were “at ’em” balls — the ones where the announcer says, “Line drive to the shortstop, who barely had to move make the catch.” Arguably, Semien was doing everything right, squaring up the ball on the barrel and consistently hitting line drives… all while his batting average was going down.

Maybe the ‘perfectly hit out’ isn’t a failure of the player. Maybe it’s just the most honest moment in the game. It’s the moment where effort meets the reality that we don’t control the results.

It’s just that way sometimes, isn’t it? Sometimes we can do everything right, and things still don’t work out. For a Mets fan in 2026, accepting that is the only way to keep watching the next inning.

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Watching Bruce Springsteen on the Land of Hope and Dreams tour, I was struck by his nightly performance of “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” It wasn’t just the music—although Tom Morello’s solo is amazing—it was the way the lyrics drawn directly from Tom’s famous speech felt like they were being written in real-time about our own headlines.

The Authoritarian Mirror

When Springsteen sings about looking for “the ghost of Tom Joad,” he’s reaching back 100 years to find language for today. Tom’s promise to be there “wherever there’s a cop beating a guy” or wherever people are “shouting ‘cause they’re crazy” and “hungry” feels devastatingly relevant in 2026, 30 years after the song’s release.

Living through this current authoritarian administration and witnessing the actions of ICE, the parallels to the 1930s “California border” are impossible to ignore. Steinbeck was writing about a time when the powerful scapegoated the poor to maintain a wealth gap that felt insurmountable. Today, we see that same machinery at work. The novel reminds us that the “problem” isn’t the family in the tent or the migrant at the border—it’s the system that demands their suffering to protect its bottom line.

The Deconstruction of Jim Casy, the preacher

While Tom provides the political fire of the book, I found myself relating deeply to Jim Casy.

Casy is a man who has walked away from the pulpit because the faith he once held and preached “don’ work no more.” In our modern vocabulary, we’d call this deconstruction. It is a term I’ve been living with for a while but haven’t spoken much about. Like Casy, I’ve found that the faith I once held—or perhaps the way I was taught to hold it—has cracked under the weight of reality.

Watching Casy navigate that space—the gap between the religion he knew and the justice he’s searching for—felt a bit like looking in a mirror. He shows us that losing your “profession” of faith isn’t the same as losing your soul. Sometimes, you have to leave behind what “don’ work no more,” to find the “big soul” that Steinbeck writes about—the one where everyone belongs to one another.

So much to process

The Grapes of Wrath is often called a “Great American Novel,” but that makes it sound like a museum piece. It’s not. It’s a map for right now. Whether it’s through a Springsteen lyric and Morello guitar solo or a novel from 1939, Tom Joad and Jim Casy are still trying to tell us something about who we are, what we believe, and who we might still become.

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Seeing Bruce Springsteen in concert a few weeks ago gave me a new appreciation for the song “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” If you haven’t heard a live version with Tom Morello, it’s worth seeking out. There’s one on Apple Music here.

That sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. I found myself Googling “Tom Joad” and rediscovering that he’s the central character in The Grapes of Wrath—one of those books many of us were assigned in high school. A few days later, I was standing in Barnes & Noble buying a copy.

What a great book! It makes me smile to write something so obvious.

There’s a reason books like this stick around. But when you’re 16, it’s hard to appreciate them. You’re reading for the test, skimming for themes, trying to figure out what the teacher wants you to say. It’s a very different experience than reading it decades later, when you have at least some sense of what it means to carry responsibility, to worry about provision, to navigate uncertain times.

So here’s my takeaway: every once in a while, it’s worth going back and picking up a classic.

More timely discoveries

One of the central themes of The Grapes of Wrath is the tension between community and individualism. I’ve heard it summed up in that familiar line: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

That idea showed up in a couple of things I watched this week.

Hoppers is a recent animated movie about a scientist who invents a way to enter into the animal kingdom. A human’s essence is placed into an animal robot, giving the human the ability to observe and understand the animals. It’s light and funny, but it carries a surprisingly strong message about interconnectedness. We’re in this together and all from one place, come up more than once—and land.

This is a Gardening Show is a Netflix series by Zach Galifinakis in which he shares he love for gardening. Each 15-minute episode features real gardening information about how to grow tomatoes, the history of corn, grafting to create apple varieties — mixed with hilarious conversations between Galifinakis and grade-school children who are also learning about these topics. It’s an enjoyable blend of silly and informative.

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I finally got to see Bruce Springsteen live on Thursday, April 9, at the Forum in Inglewood, California. It was an amazing concert (a bucket list item for me), but in many ways it felt like so much more.

The liturgy of Bruce

Bruce stepped out to center stage and opened the night “with a prayer for our men and women in service overseas.” Then came a call naming what the night would be about–“choosing hope over fear,… truth over lies, unity over division, and peace over war” (you can see it here).

Nearly three hours later, we were sent forth with a benediction. We were invited to go out and get into “good trouble” — to do something, say something, or “hell, sing something.” And most importantly to never lose the hope we find in one another, especially in settings like that one. 

In between there were expressions of grief, prophetic words that spoke truth to power, and full-throated participation from the “congregation”—singing, chanting, responding. It was, in a sense, liturgy–the work of the people. 

As I continue to struggle with much of the church in the US and it’s reluctance to speak clearly about what’s happening around us, I am so grateful to Bruce and E Street Nation for stepping into that space and rallying the people. 

Invitation

Springsteen is a master showman. Every moment feels like an invitation:

To sing the fist verse of Hungry Heart
To chant during The Streets of Minneapolis
To add background vocals with the Ohs on Badlands
Or simply to share the joy of making music with the legendary E Street Band.

Every moment is an invitation to participate.

As a proud citizen of “The United Free Republic on E Street Nation”–I have my membership jacket–I want to take that invitation seriously. To “rise up” (“My City of Ruins) and be counted among those who believe that following Jesus is more than just praying a prayer, believing a belief, or reciting a creed.

Instead, we are to bear witness to hope, truth, unity, and peace. As we saw that night at the Church on E Street.

So let’s say something.

Let’s do something.

Hell—let’s sing something.

May it be so.

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I laugh–most of the time, anyway—knowing that if the leash were 8-feet long. She’d want to get to a clump of grass that 8 feet 2 inches away. Dumb dog, right? Except, I’m pretty sure I do the same thing. You?

Many of us spend our lives striving for something we’re convinced will bring us complete satisfaction. We have a sense of what my favorite philosopher Peter Rollins calls ‘the lack.’

Life for many of us feels incomplete. We have desires for love, a car, job satisfaction, meaning, dinner. From the pedantic to the profound, we sense that there is something out there that will bring us a better life, a sense of completeness. Something that will fill the void. If only we could get that, we would be complete–without lack.

Object a

When Rollins talks about the thing we desire he calls is ‘Object a.’ I understand this label comes from his favorite philosopher Jacques Lacan, a 20th century, French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who talked about objet petit a. Object a is that elusive thing just beyond the reach of the leash that will bring us satisfaction. The problem, Rollins shares, is that Object a doesn’t exist.

Satisfaction of our ‘lack,’ is a never-ending pursuit. We’ve all experienced that moment soon after acquiring what we thought was our Object a, only to see something else, just a little further out, that will make life even more satisfying. Surely that new thing will do the trick.

Embracing the lack

Thankfully, we will never find our Object a because the pursuit, anticipation, the lack itself, is what gives life meaning. That’s why we like Christmas Eve more than Christmas Day; why our careers bring us so much satisfaction; why I spent hours combing discount racks in 90s record stores trying to complete my Chicago cassette collection. It’s joy of learning, pursuit, and practice–whether it’s working toward that promotion, trying to make the greatest cup coffee, or practicing Terry Kath guitar solo.

When we learn to embrace the lack, we can enjoy the pursuit. We can shoot 80 on the front 9 and still look forward to doing better on the back. We can go to one more record store hoping beyond hope they have the last Chicago cassette we need, while simultaneously kinda hoping it’s not there so we will get to keep looking in more record stores.

Enjoy the journey

Standing on the sidewalk with the leash stretched to its fullest length, I wish I could explain this to Mabel. That smell just out of reach is just her Object a, and it’s not going to bring her the complete satisfaction she desires. But then again, unlike me, she already enjoys the pursuit of the next scent, bird, rabbit, human… whatever is out there.

So I write this for myself as a reminder that whenever I find myself at the end of my leash—discouraged because I can’t get to the thing I’m convinced will fix everything—to embrace the lack and enjoy the journey.

Possible counter-argument that makes me laugh. From the movie ‘Good Fortune.’

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Today was a “start with one” day. And not much was happening until I got to seven, when the puzzle suddenly opened up. Sevens were going everywhere. Then a couple of eights. Then almost all the nines.

“I guess I started at the wrong end,” I thought—as if I’d done something wrong.

Then a second thought corrected the first.

There was a two I’d placed early on that eliminated a possible spot for a seven. There were two squares that could only be a three or a five, which meant the first nine could only go in one place.

It wasn’t where I started that made the difference. It was the early steps that made the later ones possible.

The myth of a better path

I’ve been there in much more consequential areas of life. We—or maybe it’s just me?—sometimes find ourselves stuck in regret that doesn’t hold up under much examination. I wish I hadn’t made that mistake. I wish I’d never taken that job, been (or stayed) in that relationship, bought that house… In many ways, those thoughts are just more complicated versions of my foolish sudoku regret of starting at the wrong end.

The Midnight Library captures this idea well. A woman gets to experience the lives she might have lived—different careers, relationships, choices—each one shaped by a single change. But that’s the thing: one change doesn’t alter just one outcome. It changes everything.

The only move that matters

We like to imagine that a different choice would have led to a better life. But that story depends on pretending everything else would have stayed the same. It rarely does. The life we have is not a consolation prize for the life we didn’t choose; it’s the result of thousands of small steps that made everything else possible.

The temptation, of course, is to keep replaying the puzzle—to imagine how things might look if we’d just started somewhere else. But the only board we ever actually get to work on is the one in front of us. The next move still matters. The puzzle is still opening. And whatever comes next can only happen from right here.

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Hey, somebody out there –
Listen to my last prayer
“Hi ho, Silver, oh!”
Deliver me from nowhere

It’s the last line of a lesser-known Springsteen song, a desperate prayer from someone who knows they’re in trouble. I’ve prayed that prayer, and I’d guess you have too when that familiar silhouette appears in the rearview mirror. But for Bruce, and for this movie, that prayer is about more than a speeding ticket.

On the surface, Deliver Me from Nowhere is the story behind how Bruce Springsteen got to release an album as unique as Nebraska. It’s a movie about art: about not letting ‘the man’ pull you over and compromise your integrity. But Springsteen has said, “If I had to pick one album out and say this is going to represent you 50 years from now, I’d pick Nebraska.”

Not the breakout Born to Run. Not the single-machine, Born in the USA. But Nebraska–the stark, quiet and often dark album I had on cassette four decades ago.

Clearly, something deeper is going on.

Mansion on the Hill

The crux of this movie, for me, is a question I’ve asked myself: What do you do when by all external measures you should be happy, but you’re not?

We enter the story at the should part. Springsteen has just come off a successful tour. His record company is excited for his next album–unlike previous times (see my thoughts on the book Welcome to Jungleland). He has a hit playing on the radio, and his first new car. It’s all going well, but…

The promise of the mansion on the hill may not solve everything. .

You’ve been there, right? I have.

There comes a time when all the things we do to outrun the sadness stop working, and there is no place left to go. You have to face it, confront it, deal with it. For Bruce that happens in a rented bedroom in Colts Neck, NJ with an acoustic guitar, a notepad, an Echoplex, and a 4-track recorder.

My Father’s House

Everything, it seems, reminds him of earlier days, for which there is little nostalgia. His unresolved feelings toward his father won’t leave him alone.

On Pop Culture Happy Hour’s episode about the movie, host Linda Holmes makes a great observation:

it is so common–not just in biopics and true stories, but in movies in general–it is so common to see somebody struggling and struggling with what is obviously depression and trauma and, you know, generational trauma and problems from their relationships with their parents, and see it resolve through some combination of catharsis, right? Going and kind of having it out with the person or forgiving the person or talking to a romantic interest, and that person tells you to get it together or get over it, and whatever. In this, he goes to the doctor.

There’s something powerful about seeing a rock icon choose therapy over theatrics–it’s more real than that. That’s part of the draw for me. This movie isn’t about a rock-star, but a person dealing with the pain of past hurts.

Reason to Believe

Is the movie any good? I honestly have no idea.

For a fan like me, it was very cool: seeing how the lyrics evolved, how the struggle mattered, how Springsteen stayed true to himself, his ear, his vision. I even got to see a depiction of Asbury Park in the 80s–a place I’d been many times.

On its own as a movie, though? I’ve seen the mixed reviews. Maybe people want the cliche, the victorious ending that is impossible to relate to unless you too have played Wembley Stadium, a la Bohemian Rhapsody or Rocketman. Instead, we get an indie-feeling movie with a big star and budget about an indie-feeling album from a big star with a big budget.

I don’t know. Sounds about right to me.

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The stakes. The pressure. The drive. 
Tonight in Jungleland tells the story of the journey Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band took to record Born to Run. 

Before the Boss was The Boss

After two critically acclaimed albums that suffered from mediocre sales, Bruce’s relationship with his record company was insecure at best. As he was preparing to record album three, executives weren’t sure they wanted to put up the money. Fifty years later, it’s hard to imagine anyone questioning whether this guy from New Jersey had what it takes to be a rock star. 

If you want an inside look at the making of one of the greatest albums in rock & roll history, I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Every aspect of the process is covered—songwriting and the evolution of lyrics, testing songs on the road, searching for the right drum sound and a piano that refused to stay in tune. Even the story behind that iconic album cover is included (did you know the button on the guitar strap was a nod to Elvis?). 

Author Peter Ames Carlin—who also wrote Bruce a fantastic biography—draws from interviews with E Street members and other insiders, access to raw studio session recordings, and a conversation with The Boss himself on the occasion of his 75th birthday. 

Why this is a book for me

Full disclosure: I’m the target audience for this book. I’m a longtime Springsteen fan. As a man of certain age who grew up in New Jersey, some might say my fandom was pre-ordained. My Spotify Wrapped puts me in the top 1-2% of Bruce listeners every year, and I play his music on my blonde, blackguard Telecaster—getting as close to Bruce’s Esquire hybrid as I can. So, it shouldn’t surprise you to read that I loved this book.

If you, like me, hail from the Jersey Shore, there’s the added bonus of familiar references—from a trip to Long Beach Island to reviews in the Asbury Park Press and more. 

But if you love music, appreciate Bruce, or just enjoy learning about the process behind the making of great art, give Tonight in Jungleland a read.

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Like a lot of us who are into DIY, my dad’s garage was filled with “right” tools. There were full sets of wrenches available to me: metric, standard, boxed, open-ended, ratchets, allens, torx, and more. There were so many screwdrivers in one drawer that he made sure all the phillips faced one way, and all the bladed faced the other. The pliers drawers had standard, needle-nose, vice grips, pipe wrenches, clamp adjusters, and even a faucet wrench. On one shelf there was a coffee can filled with nuts and bolts that more often than not, contained what was needed to get the job done. And, of course, there were those tools that fit that one bolt on that one car that we hadn’t owned for a decade–I have one of those in my toolbox right now.

Even at my young age, I knew there was a “right” tool for the bolt I was working on, and without a doubt, it wasn’t too far away. But in my youthful reasoning, I found convenience in having one wrench that could grab all the bolts.

But my dad was right. There was a better tool not too far away that would do the job much better and easier.

Am I a tool?

Over the years, I’ve learned this advice, like many of my dad’s aphorisms, had broader application than I noticed as a young bicycle mechanic. There are many of us–or maybe it’s just me–who try to be the adjustable wrench, the seat-filler, the reliable person who tries to do all things, or at least more than we should.

A few years later, I was in college. During one of the more evangelical phases of my faith journey, my friend Hoss and I had a conversation about how different we were in so many areas of life, yet so similar in our desire to be in ministry. I was a suburban kid from NJ; he from the Appalachian hills of West Virginia. He was a pitcher on our baseball team; I am a baseball fan. He had a slow, southern drawl; I speak with east coast speed.

Soon, we began to realize this is a feature, not a bug. The difference are part of the plan, the way we are designed.

As we marveled at the ministries we dreamed to be part of, the metaphor we settled upon was—you guessed it—a toolbox. We were tools in God’s toolbox. We started saying thing like, “you could use a hammer to drive a screw, or a screwdriver to drive a nail, but thankfully we weren’t all the same and God can use us differently.” Ah, the depth of a late-night conversation between college students.

Not sure I would still put it that way, but there is something to be said for knowing your unique set of interests and aptitudes and using them to serve others in the right ways. 

I know I have spent far too many seasons of life trying to be an adjustable wrench–molding myself to whatever needed doing, even if that isn’t what I’ve been built for. I’ve frustrated myself trying to overcome weaknesses rather than hone strengths, to be all things to all people, to meet the need–whatever, wherever, whenever that might be. Far too often I have seen myself as the only tool, rather than just one uniquely gifted tool among many.

A community of tools

One of the things I like most about this toolbox illustration, is that it emphasizes community.

At the risk of mixing metaphors, there’s a line in Bull Durham that makes a similar point. In one of the many memorable conversations between pitcher and catcher on the mound, Crash (Kevin Costner) says to Nuke (Tim Robbins),

“Relax, all right? Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls – it’s more democratic.”

Nuke was trying to strike everybody out, to do it all himself, as if the rest of the team wasn’t on the field. He was trying to be the adjustable wrench, taking care of every bolt by himself. But there was a whole team behind him, ready to use their gifts to do the job they were designed to do.

I need to hear that today. Relax, all right? Do what you do, and stop trying to do more than you were designed to do.

Because Rome wasn’t built with an adjustable wrench.

It took the right tools, working together, each doing what they were made to do. Same goes for us.

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If you know only one thing about my Dad, my best guess is that you know of his love of riding his motorcycle—a passion he passed on to my brother and me. 

What you may not know, however, is that some seventeen or so years ago, my dad took my family on an epic motorcycle ride. 

He got on his Harley in Beachwood, New Jersey, riding to our home in Colorado Springs, where JT who was about 12 at the time, got on the back of my dad’s bike, I got on my Honda, and Diane and Kristi followed in our car to visit my brother Ron in California. Several years later, JT would repeat the trip with my Dad, a memory I know he cherishes.

That trip holds many memories for me that have been in my thoughts quite a bit over the past few days. We rode our motorcycles thru Zion National Park, to the Grand Canyon, through the heat of Death Valley and some of the coldest rain I’ve ever felt in the Ute Pass in the Rocky Mountains. We got separated for a minute in Las Vegas–I’m still not sure how–I ran out of gas in Colorado, and one day we stopped to eat at a diner that was standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. 

But my favorite image from the trip is a photo that hung on the wall of my office for years (and is posted above). We were stopped at a light somewhere on Route 66 when Diane took the picture from the car. Kristi is behind me, and JT is behind my Dad, who is talking to me with a giant smile on his face. Probably telling me the plan for the next few miles and loving every minute of it. 

I like that picture because in addition to the memories, that trip serves as a metaphor for me. For those 2-plus weeks, I rode behind my Dad for hundreds of miles—following his lead as he showed me the way—as he did in so many aspects of my life before and after that trip. 

Teacher and leader

My dad liked to teach. He shared some memorable aphorisms, like: 

• You go to Hell for lying, same as you do for stealing — a theological truth I didn’t recognize the veracity of until seminary. 
• The job isn’t over until the tools are put away — another piece of advice I think about quite a bit.
• And one he said to me one day as I was working on my bicycle: Rome wasn’t built with an adjustable wrench — his version of ‘the right tool for the right job.’ And if you’ve ever seen my dad’s garage, you know he had the right tool but I hadn’t taken the time to look for it. 

But more often than not, the lessons he taught were by example. Those have been much more lasting. For example,

• He tried to do the right thing, even when it was the hard thing. 
• The hardworking soul that he was, he made time to coach Little League, and this strange new sport called soccer that he had to read books and watch VHS tapes about to understand enough to be the assistant coach. 
• He modeled church for us—going every Sunday—even if he got to stay in the narthex with the ushers, which always seemed cool to us. 
• And just this past week, I heard that even with Alzheimer’s my dad’s love for my mom, and her love and dedication to him made an amazing impression on the staff caring for him in the nursing home. 

Finding our way

Another one of those examples was during that motorcycle trip. At one point of the trip we came to an intersection and weren’t 100% sure how to stay on Route 66. I was ready to give up, get on the interstate that we could see, and make up some time. I’m so glad Dad didn’t agree. 

Thru a process of elimination, we decided Route 66 had to be this way—or at least it was worth taking the time to find out. I’m so glad he encouraged us to do that. 

That switchback-filled stretch of highway was one of the most memorable of the trip, ending in historic Oatman, Arizona, where there were donkeys in the road. If he would have listened to me, we would have had a more pedestrian day, and not one of the best of the trip. 

Talking about that decision to continue looking for the right route—it might have been that night or years after—Dad said something like, “You can get on the highway and get there. Or you can find Route 66 and enjoy the ride.” Metaphor.Rough roads

Over the last few years, as my dad’s illness progressed—it was a living Hell for my mom and dad. The ride was really hard as so much was taken, so slowly. Alzheimer’s sucks. 

But today, I’m choosing to remember the better parts of the ride, grateful for my dad who was always leading the way, mile after mile. Because the truth is that life can be hard, it’s sometimes a little dangerous, and it goes by incredibly fast. 

So maybe I need to keep following his lead—take the time to find Route 66 and enjoy the ride. 

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