Inning Number One!

So everyone has been pushing me that I should blog because I've heard that my life is too interesting not to get it all down. Maybe everyone is right, maybe, just maybe, my life is wayyyy too amazing to not share it! When I started considering creating a blog, I thought about it a thousand times before actually doing it because everyone had such catchy blog names and I couldn't think of anything that really fit me. Grace: Insight to my Silent World....I mean, hello, how catchy is that?!?! So I thought and thought and thought some more about what I would do that would really fit me and this morning at the Little League Opening Day, it hit me! My life revolved around something I love...baseball. I realized that I am not every other female in the world, I'm so insanely different and I truly am a woman living in a man's world when it comes to my life and my love for baseball. So here it goes... I've gotten past the batting practice, and taking ground balls so it's time to start the game.

Batter's Box:
      So here's where it all began... I was four years old and I was the ONLY girl on my T-Ball team. This isn't a love at first sight thing, no worries. I hated T-Ball. I thought it was totally boring and couldn't believe that I let my parents talk me into something so boyish. So at every game, they put me in the oufield and I stood out there wondering when the silly second baseman was gonna learn to stop the ball so that I didn't have to truck it up there and get it myself or when the dense little boy on third was ever gonna actually make the throw to first without the pointless kid standing on the pitcher's mound (hello it's T-Ball, why is someone on the pitcher's mound) having to turn into the cut off and come to his rescue. According to my parents, after every game I had something that I thought should be corrected on my T-Ball team. I wasn't sure what everything in baseball meant but I knew then that there had to be some better way to get things done and win a T-Ball game (even though technically they didn't keep score) So that's when it happened.... something in my four year old mind clicked and I wanted to learn everything there was to know about baseball so that I could understand what was going wrong with my T-Ball team. Needless to say, after that season I never played baseball again. However, I did attend every game that my brother and cousin played in up until I was in high school.
     When I was fifteen years old, I began dating my high school sweetheart.... Sebie: the 6'1'' right handed ace(the starting pitcher for those who don't know what that is) for Laurence Manning Academy. Immediately we found that we had so much in common and we were head over heels for each other. He was my baseball player and he had totally knocked me off my feet. Sebie and I went to college together at Francis Marion University and yep, you probably guessed it, he came on a baseball scholarship. Baseball, baseball, baseball....that was our life for four solid years. We talked about lots of things but most everything reverted back to baseball, it's what brought us together and some might could say that it is what tore us apart. In the early spring of 2010, Sebie tore all of the cartilage around his right knee. He was strong about it in front of everyone else but was a complete disaster around me. He thought he had lost everything when he lost baseball and things began to change a little or a lot... some things had happened in our four years together and I told everyone that just like with baseball I would give him a chance to strikeout. Cheating the first time, Strike One. Cheating the Second Time, Strike Two. Making me believe that I meant nothing to him, Strike Three. The one guy that I thought I would spend the rest of my life with had truly let me down so it was time to get him off the mound, sit him back in the bull pen, and move on with the game. Without him, I didn't know what to do. I had lost the guy that I loved and I hated the game that I always loved for making that guy I loved a different person. Then, it happened, God dropped it right in my face....My internship with the Florence RedWolves or as I like to call it my broken heart healer.
    A lot of things happened in between but I began to love the game again. I found that God had truly blessed me with healing and strength and not to mention, an amazing support system with the RedWolves family which is who I spent almost every waking hour with during the summer of 2010. I must get asked a million times a week why I still spend so much time helping the RedWolves when I take 18 hours of classes, work 30 hours a week, work out every day, and keep up with all of my Ms. FMU stuff...well, for those who I never have taken the time to explain it to, there you go, that's why. My RedWolves family was like my pitching staff all full of relief pitchers.... when I wasn't strong enough to hold myself together or throw one more pitch, I knew that I could go take a breather while any of them could come in and clean up my mess. Rule number 1 in my baseball book: always be fully equipped with a STRONG pitching staff.