Another Bottle of MJ Water

“Didn’t you play any sports, Mom?” JP stood ankle deep in the clover across the yard and released the ball again toward my head.

“Nope.” I stuck out my gloved hand and nabbed it, thankfully without any awkward dance steps to retrieve it before I let it sail through the kitchen window. “Not a single one.”

He already knows how I established once and for all that height and ability are not doled out in equal portions, the single time I reported for basketball practice in my high school gym. We concluded that day that it would be best for everyone that I continued to keep my talents hidden.

“Not even softball? You could play first base you know,” he laughed, as I stretched to pluck another ball out of the air and narrowly avoided a face-first confrontation with the earth.

He was kind, calling out “My bad!” whenever I would miss and have to jog to collect an errant ball, opting not to make all the jokes that might have come quite easily.

And he was concerned, cautioning me to “Throw it over the top, Mom, or you’re going to have to get the Tommy John’s!” I’m sure that as soon as he turned his back to chase down the wild curve I didn’t mean to throw that he was really muttering, “You throw like a girl.”

He soon tired of my girl throwing and went to work on his pitching instead. We tried out his new iPod app to clock the speed of his pitch. When he ribbed me over my slow reflexes in tapping the screen, I asked him how that MJ water was working out for him.

::

We’d been talking about the MJ water for a while at our house, recalling the scene in Space Jam where Bugs Bunny slapped a “Michael’s Secret Stuff” label on a water bottle and shared it with his struggling team, hoping that if they believed that bottle contained the stuff that made Michael Jordan great, then they would play like they too were great.

It worked. At least on the screen.

And we wondered if the same was true of the titanium necklaces made popular by MLB players. Is there really a therapeutic quality to them that restores battered muscles and improves performance? Or does the belief that they do so inspire the athlete to push through pain and resistance and perform better on their own?

Is it just an pricey version of MJ water?

Look good, feel good?

We’re still running tests.

::

Somewhere past my bedtime the other night I went to pick up JP from the ballfield. He and a friend wandered aimlessly around the grounds and I wondered if I’d somehow tripped into that invisibility cloak again. Turned out his friend had parted with his cell phone sometime during the evening and they were on the hunt.

At my house we’ve made an art form of phone loss and destruction. We know how to launder them in the permanent press cycle, lose them, run over them, lose them, fall on them, lose them, drop them, and lose them like nobody’s business. We’ve made a lifetime deal with the devil in our wireless service contract.

So like any compassionate parent (who wants to go to bed) would do, I parked the car and started looking with them.

They checked the men’s room. The concession stand. The press box. The grass.

We checked lots of grass.

I pointed to the bleachers, and they assured me that they had already looked. I hoped they were right. I crouched and glanced in from a safe distance, and shuddered. Seeing the piles of spit-soaked seeds on top of spit-covered tar made my mouth water in that I’m-going-to-vomit-on-this-sea-of-saliva way and I jumped back.

Despair started its slow creep as we ran out of places to look. The two began a long walk to the water tower a full football field away as I made one more scan in the blue glow of the flood lights on the lawn outside the stadium.

Show us the phone, God. Do this thing. Please.

Show us the phone.

I took a few more steps, wondering aloud how much longer I should allow them to look before I took the young man home to face his own parents. As I debated, the sod lit up in front of me, a beautiful LCD glow winking from between blades of grass.

I bent over to pick up the phone, buzzing wildly in its muted vibrate mode as JP dialed from across the field one last time. I stretched the phone high in the air, waving the digital glow for the boys to see.

As tired and relieved bodies bundled into the car to go home, they asked how I found it. I told them I asked God to show it to us. And it looked like He did.

When it was back to just the two of us in the car, JP looked sideways at me and said, “Really? You prayed about it?”

“Sure,” I said. “God cares about stuff like that.”

He thought awhile, and reached his conclusion. “Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe it wasn’t God.”

I wondered, did he think I was drinking the spiritual MJ water? That praying was like a titanium necklace? Since I prayed and we saw a good outcome I’d mistakenly associated the two?

I smiled, strangely comfortable that I didn’t have to convince him of anything he wasn’t quite ready to buy. “Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t,” I told him. “But even if He didn’t, He could do it. He could if He wanted to, right?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

And I remember. Faith is never a given. It doesn’t come naturally, and often not easy. As much as sometimes I just want them to take my word for it, I know that even kids will have to pounce on the mat and wrestle down doubt and belief too. And when they do, that faith they claim will become truly theirs to hold.

Meanwhile, it seems I set off to quietly grappling anew over the “if He wanted to” part.

::

Photo: JP at pitching practice in the back yard