We started watching a Grinch Christmas show last night and I heard him say something about 53 years. That is my age and I started to pay a little more attention to see how I might identify with the character. A friend told me that our witness for Christ will continually evolve as we grow in faith. I understood what he was saying, but I might recharacterize it as follows: our ability to impact others with our witness is what is growing not so much as our witness evolving. I could never identify with people whose kids were going off to college before we started the process. I still have the same God impacted life to talk about, but now there is more of it. I do not lessen the utility of my early witness stories; I just have more to add when the audience seems to be ready for something different.
I went to a card show this weekend. When I was much younger, I collected Tony Oliva due to the colorfulness of a few of his cards. I was too young to have seen him play much and Minnesota was the land of the Purple People Eaters, so the Twins were not really on my baseball radar as an eight-year-old. A few years back I decided to limit my collection of vintage cards to sets (that effort ended quickly) or Hall of Famers that I had some connection to. Mainly my connection was that I followed their careers. Stand outs from that era include Nolan Ryan (since he played so long), Tim Raines, Chipper Jones, Vladimir Guerrero, etc. Roy Halladay began the era of guys who appeared on the scene after I stopped paying attention beyond the Astros, and the list will most likely be limited to Astros going forward.
At one point (it looks like 1996), a player I liked got into the Hall of Fame through the Veterans Committee: Jim Bunning. I never assumed he would get in, but I liked him. It brought up the question of how to balance the small list of players I liked that were only going to get in through the veterans committee and how that would impact my collecting. In 1999, Orlando Cepeda got in, the question was answered, and I was off to fill in the cards I did not have. Almost twenty years later, the third and forth on this list got in (Trammel and Morris) and I made the decision to collect all those guys who I liked enough to include on the list that had a realistic shot at the Hall of Fame. Lee Smith, Harold Baines, Ted Simmons, and others, but apparently not Jim Kaat and Tony Oliva. So, this week I scrambled to get them complete before the prices went through the roof. (It turns out people pay more for Hall of Fame rookie cards than those we are not. Oliva’s rookie went up by a factor of four overnight.)
So, at the card show, I saw a 1956 Al Kaline that I have on my list of old cards to get. I had money in my wallet and there I waffled. Did I really want any of these cards more than the money it would cost to get them? I would gladly trade, and I would gladly use funds from selling ( I suppose), but cold, hard cash? That seemed to be another story. There are 92 cards on this list ranging from a few pennies in value to a card that can easily sell for over $10,000. Of these, 33 are over my maximum card limit and the question changes. How poor of condition card would I be willing to add to plug a hole in the list? A terrible condition version of the $10,000 card would still probably be too much and would not fit in with the effort I put getting nice versions of the ones I have now.
In the end, I have determined to limit my card activities as much as possible to those that I can share with others and potentially share Christ in. The list was probably at close to 100 back in 1999 when I put the plan together, so I have been adding about a card every other year. I can live with that kind of progress as long as I am enjoying the journey. It will be fun to see how often God leads me forward along this path.