Random 2022

Today is the last day before vacation and the last day I know I will have the where with all to write something and get it posted. Over the years, I have transitioned from writing about the Astros with the intent to weave in some hint of Jesus to flat out writing about Jesus and the Bible. I originally wanted my friends to be as excited about the Astros as I was, and I was excited to share what I knew that made me excited. Two World Series victories later, I still like the Astros and expect them to do well, but they no longer excite me. I am not sure I am excited enough to say I am excited to be writing about Jesus, but I am strongly changed by knowing Jesus, and I want this for my friends who do not already have it.

I cannot remember exactly when my brain switched from being a baseball fan to an Astros fan, but it was much easier to know a lot about one team than to know everything about every team. In 2004, when I started collecting baseball cards again, I went from collecting sets of everyone to only a few cards of a few Astros now. A friend bought me a box of cards for Christmas, and I only knew the Astros and one old guy who was around back in 2004.

This year as the big kid transitioned off to college, the little kid transitioned away from toys. I took the opportunity to rearrange the toy storage area to allow better access to my cards, and I have been slowly minimizing what I have to keep track of and further minimizing what I am willing to even consider spending money on. I am just a little more annoyed when I buy a card that I did not know I already had these days, and I have to stop that. Eventually, I intend to know what I have, where it is, and eventually only have cards I want and nothing extra.

My mentor has discovered just how frugal I am in some areas and makes fun of me for my choices. Someone on ebay listed a card I wanted from 2011. It is of a guy who barely had a career in the major leagues, and I figured I might get it for $30. I bid a little higher so that I would not have to try and bid at the last minute during a family dinner, but it went for more than four times what I was expecting, and way more than I wanted to spend. I was shocked.

While my friend was watching me open the cards he got me, I showed him a card I found in my effort to minimize that I did not know I had. For fun, we looked up the “value” of this unexpected card. It was $400. I was shocked. This random unknown card is now worth more than almost all the other individual cards I have collected since 1978 (that’s 44 years).

I do not collect cards to make money, and my only use for value in cards is to make sure I do not spend more than I want (and that I do not throw away a card that I could sell). But my new goal is to try and weave Jesus into how I spend effort on baseball cards. The only way to do that is to engage with other people to trade and sell cards and talk about Jesus in the process. Now that I have said it, it has to be more real. 2022 has been a solid year of getting more of my stuff together (i.e. maturing) and if I am not careful, I might spend 2023 not moaning that I am an old man (humor). God has blessed me and I want to do better about using myself to bless others as well. Have a Happy New Year.