A Little Perspective

I recently finished reading "Golfing with God" by Roland Merullo. My massage therapist plunked it off his bookshelf and tossed it into my lap after my last session. You see, I took up golf this summer. If you play golf you know what that means. If you don't play, you may not understand until you do. It is one of those life experiences like having a baby, or witnessing death, that you have no frame of reference for unless you have gone through it.

I am thinking that Merullo was an excellent student of golf and life. Here is an excerpt from chapter two of the book I found particularly funny and truthful to golf and life. God's lieutenant, Julian is taking Hank Winston, a golf pro, to see God, to help Him with His game.

"I've never seen anyone in a hurry in heaven," I said nervously, holding onto the edge of the gilded roof with one hand.

"God is impatient."

"But that's impossible."

Julian turned his eyes to me for so long that he nearly drove off the gravel path. "Listen," he said, facing forward again and jerking once at the wheel to keep us from careening into a ditch. "If you're going to work with Him you're going to have to get rid of all these assumptions. The universes move incredibly slowly to His eye. The suns and planets twirl as if mired in honey. People learn their lessons over thousands of lives, when, in fact, those lessons seem to Him almost absurdly basic, ridiculously simple. In His frustration, He keeps sending saints, saviors, and various kinds of prophets down to speed up the process. People listen for a while, some of them, then keep forgetting what they've been taught and start reverting to old habits-hatred, greed, murder, war, and so on. Plus, on top of that, He's been playing golf perfectly since the day He invented it. And when I use the word perfectly I mean exactly that. Now, suddenly, as of yesterday morning, something has gone terribly wrong."



I have talked to enough golfers who agree that every so often their game is off and they revert back to old habits. I have lived long enough on earth to have repeated life lessons over and over and over again until I got them, and then had to relearn them again. If all these lessons in life and golf are so basic, why do we make it so hard and struggle so much? An ironic part of life and golf? Or just human nature?



What are your thoughts?