And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. (Genesis 1: 3,4)
I’ve never found talking to the golf ball particularly helpful, even though most of us do it now and then. Lee Trevino famously once said, “You can talk to a fade, but a draw won’t listen.”
Dennis Darville tells a story from when he was on the golf team in high school. His team’s #6 player was matched with their opponents’ #1, who had the whole golfing thing extremely well figured out.
When asked, after the match, how it had gone, Dennis’ teammate said, “I think I played with God today. He’d say, ‘Go left,’ and the ball would go left. ‘Land soft’ and the ball would land soft. ‘Don’t go in that trap,’ and it wouldn’t.
It worked for me once. Talking to the ball. Three of us were making our way around the course and had come to a 130-yard par three over water. My friend, Phillip, teed it up and took a swing. It’s funny how, based on the sound of the ball coming off the club and the flight path in the first 30 yards or so, you can quickly sense that a shot will be quite good. And this was. So I spontaneously blurted out, “Go in the hole!” And it did.
At his request, I’ve since repeated the experiment several times with Phillip, and it turns out that achieving holes-in-one is not my superpower.
“Don’t go left!” often seems to precede the ball going far left. “Not in the water…!” is generally punctuated by a splash. “Whoa ball!” on the green is usually the lead-in to a ten-foot uphill follow-up putt. “Bite!” often predicts a chip from the back side of the green.
If there are ears on a golf ball, I’ve never seen them. Nor have they ever listened to me, except maybe that one time.
Of course, the creation account indicates that God’s speech is “next level.” Creative! “And God said …. And there was ….” Dennis’ high school teammate had his theological categories in reasonable order, recognizing that God’s word is uniquely creative, raising the suspicion that he had perhaps golfed with God. (Don’t immediately dismiss human athletic interactions with God. How, after all, did the patriarch Jacob get that bum hip?)
You wouldn’t naturally expect the admonition, “Lazarus, come out,” to have gotten much of a response from a man who had been dead for four days. But it did.
Creating life from death. Which was a lead-in to creating life from death on a much larger scale. When the second person of the Trinity proclaimed, just prior to His participation in death on our behalf: “It is finished.”
His transition from life to death created our transition from death to life, which is of considerably more consequence than causing a golf ball to change direction.
Prayer: Lord, thank you that your word is sure and that, in Christ, it does not condemn us.