Batter Up!

Romans 8:1–11

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus
• the law of the Spirit of life has set you free
• who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit
• give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you

Applying the Word to My Life:
Early in my career, patent prosecution was hard for me. I had a team of really good attorneys around me, and they helped me see just how many mistakes I was making — more than my perfectionist self was comfortable with. Rather than working on my weakness, I gravitated toward the things I already did well, like litigation and licensing.

Over time I built real expertise in all of it. I can look at a patent today and tell you whether it is well written, whether the claims will hold up, whether the attorney who drafted it knew what they were doing. Litigation and licensing are built entirely on testing that kind of thing. But I never really got good at drafting patents. I just stopped trying.

For a long time I told myself that was a matter of finding my strengths. But if I am honest, something else was happening underneath it. Every mistake in a patent application felt like a verdict on me — not just something to fix, but proof I wasn't good at this. Rather than sit with that discomfort long enough to learn from it, I moved to ground where I would not fail as often.

I think there are two ways to fail at learning something. They look like opposites but come from the same place. One is to fall and keep falling the same way, never stopping to ask why, because stopping to look feels like it will only confirm what you are afraid is true. The other is to stop trying altogether, and call it finding your strengths instead of calling it what it is. Both come from treating the fall itself as the verdict.

This is exactly the temptation waiting inside Paul's words. It would be easy to hear that the verdict is gone and assume our mistakes don't matter — that there is nothing left to examine. Paul doesn't let it stand alone that way. In the same breath he ties the freedom to a walk, a real and ongoing direction, one shaped by the Spirit and not the flesh. And then he goes further. Even while the body is still dying because of sin, the Spirit already is life — and the same Spirit that raised Jesus will one day give life to that body too. The struggle is not over. The verdict is. The falls still happen, but they don't get to define us.

The absence of condemnation does not mean there are no expectations. It means the fall is no longer the verdict — we are finally free to stop, look at it, and take the next step.

Every professional athlete has had to go through this. Think about where they would be if they didn't stop to understand what went wrong or, even worse, just gave up and tried something else. Getting up to try again, after understanding what didn't work the last try, is the path to becoming good at something that could otherwise be a verdict on them.

That is exactly what I never let myself do with patent prosecution. I stopped taking the swing instead of learning why I kept missing.

This is what a lot of us do with our faith life too. We gloss over the times we stumble, or we stop trying at the hard things altogether. We justify ourselves as generally good people, or at least better than the person next to us.

But that is not what walking with Him actually looks like. It is the willingness to notice every stumble, understand it, and get back up facing the same direction, closer to the path He already walked, not further from it.

My Response for Today:
Today I will find one place in my faith life where I have been failing or avoiding it altogether, and I will stop to understand why.