Bulletin Articles
Psalm 103:2-3
Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases. -Psalm 103:2-3
"If you build it, he will come." So says "the voice" to Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella in the film Field of Dreams. Ray figures out that if he builds a baseball field in his cornfield, then his dad's favorite baseball player, Shoeless Joe Jackson- who, along with seven other Chicago White Sox players, was banned from baseball for throwing the 1919 World Series-will get to come back and play ball again.
Ray builds the field and Jackson appears, along with other players from that era, to play baseball. But "the voice" is not done. First it directs Ray to Boston to ease the pain of Terrence Mann, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who secretly loved baseball. Then it sends Ray and Terrence to Minnesota to find a ball-player who, after never getting the chance to swing a bat in the Majors, became a much-loved small-town doctor.
As they drive back to lowa, Ray shares how his dad tried and failed to make it as a ballplayer and how, as a teenager, Ray had called his dad's favorite player a criminal. Ray left home in anger at seventeen and never saw his father alive again. He lived with regret ever since. And even after Shoeless Joe comes to play baseball again, Ray has no peace.
All of us have done things that we regret. We have hurt those we love with our words and our actions. We can't take back the words, and we can't undo the actions. Regrets are the stains that we can't get out, no matter how hard we try.
God knows our regrets and their impacts on our lives. He forgives all our iniquity. He washes away the stains that have permeated our souls, robbing us of peace. He heals us and frees us.
We don't have to plow under a cornfield to make it happen.
