A revaluation in the market for baseball players resonates in the lives of young men. It was as if a signal had radiated out from the Oakland A's draft room and sought, laserlike, those guys who for their whole career had seen their accomplishments understood with an asterisk. The footnote at the bottom of the page said, "He'll never go anywhere because he doesn't look like a big league ballplayer." — Moneyball: The art of winning an unfair game by Michael Lewis

Billy Beane, the Oakland A's general manager, wanted to assemble a winning baseball team. But Beane had a serious problem: The A's were among Major League Baseball's poorest franchises, and they simply couldn't compete financially with deep-pocketed, powerhouse teams like the New York Yankees. The A's budget for player salaries in 1999 was about $40 million, yet they had to bid for players against teams who would spend three or four times that much.

The highest-paid baseball players are remarkably talented. They are powerful hitters, athletic fielders, and pitchers with a wicked arsenal of unhittable pitches. And, though it might seem strange to say it, they are all men who look good in the uniform. The traditions of baseball scouting have always relied heavily on a certain undefinable know-it-when-you-see-it gut feeling about how a player looks when he's on the field, and how he might blossom in the big leagues.

What Billy Beane realized, with the help of a number-crunching Harvard-educated assistant named Paul DePodesta, was that there were college ball players out there who were even more talented at generating runs and wins for their teams, but who had been overlooked by the scouts because they were too short, too fat, too slow, or had some idiosyncratic quirk in their pitching or hitting technique — in other words, they didn't fit the classical ideals of what a ball player should look like.

None of the majors wanted these players. Their skills were economically undervalued, and a smart, poor team who recognized the skill and didn't care about the classical ideals could be competitive by snatching up such players cheaply, for a fraction of their true value.

Without explaining themselves to the public, and especially not to the other teams, Beane and DePodesta began assembling a team that looked like it might have come from the Island of Misfit Toys. And to the amazement, even the embarrassment, of Major League Baseball, the A's began winning games. Lots of games.

In 2002, in what became known as "the streak," the A's broke the previous American League record by amassing 20 consecutive wins in the regular season. The teams with the big budgets called them "lucky." Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta knew differently — they had discovered a truth about baseball that no one else had figured out — baseball traditions were leading teams to overlook some of the most talented players in the country.

So where does this leave the philosophers, the scholars, and the world's brilliant debaters? God has made the wisdom of this world look foolish. ... This foolish plan of God is wiser than the wisest of human plans, and God's weakness is stronger than the greatest of human strength. Remember, dear brothers and sisters, that few of you were wise in the world's eyes or powerful or wealthy when God called you. Instead, God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And He chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful. God chose things despised by the world, things counted as nothing at all, and used them to bring to nothing what the world considers important. As a result, no one can ever boast in the presence of God. — 1 Corinthians 1:20, 25-29, NLT

Beginning with the disciples, Jesus chose men not for their education, nor their power, nor their connections, not even for their faith, but for qualities that were hidden inside of them, qualities of the heart. And as the early church grew, while it did indeed attract men and women from the privileged classes of Jewish and Roman society, its enormous appeal and rapid spread throughout the Roman world was due to its appeal to the masses of ordinary men and women who were drawn to the person and words of Jesus Christ.

Around the world, most societies more highly value those who are from the highest class or caste over those who are more "common", those who have gone to the "right" schools over those whose education is less formal, those who have white skin over those whose skin is darker, those who have wealth over those who are poor, males over females, city dwellers over those who live off the land.

But in Christ, all have equal standing before God, all have been given his Holy Spirit, all have been given gifts to use to serve the church, all are equally responsible for taking the Gospel of redemption to their family, their neighbors, and to the far corners of the earth.

In Christ's church, blacks and browns and whites all have things to learn from each other, as do the wealthy and the poor, the upper and lower classes, Harvard graduates and auto body mechanics, even Republicans and Democrats.

In the realpolitik of everyday life there will be differences of opinion about policies and priorities and strategies between men and women who share the same faith and are disciples of the same Christ. But as members of the Kingdom of God, we have a foundational unity, a fundamental respect for and love of those who are not like us, because before the cross we are intrinsically equals: equally indebted to Jesus, equally valued by God.

Billy Beane's A's were a joke to the other major league teams, until those teams started losing to that band of underpaid misfits.

The church Jesus has assembled to represent his Gospel doesn't look like much, either, but it is quietly building God's Kingdom, doing God's work, shining light in dark places, bringing hope and love where neither have ever been seen before.

The world may not give you a second look, but God wants to draft you onto his team. He knows your strengths and weaknesses, he knows your heart, and he knows what you can become once the power of Christ fills your life. The world may not value us, but in Christ we are champions.

Photo credit: Douglas Andrew Sundin

I often look at my watch at this point and make a mental note of when the flight has begun. But the truth is, even as we are gaining speed, "flight" is still an open question. Up in the cockpit the decision to fly has not yet been made. The pilots are paying careful attention to the speed, distance and engine indicators for evidence that the plane is performing normally. Far down the runway at a calculated spot, a commitment will be required: either keep going and fly, or abort and stand on the brakes, hoping to stop before the plane runs out of pavement.

This decision point is the last opportunity to safely stop if things don't seem right. It is the last opportunity to remain on the ground — beyond that point, the pilots must let go of the earth and put all of their skill into flying. Once committed to flying, they are all in, just like a poker player who bets all of his winnings on the 5 cards in his hand.

Most of us prefer some wiggle room in our decisions. We'd like some options, an escape hatch, some way of keeping a small mistake from becoming a fatal one.

We have seat belts in our cars, but should we forget to buckle up we also have airbags, collapsible steering columns and impact-absorbing crush zones. When we make a major purchase, we have a 3-day period for changing our minds and backing out of the deal.

The fear of making an all or nothing commitment has led many young men and women to cohabitate before marrying, giving each of them an easy way out if reality fails to live up expectations. What they fail to realize is that they are only playing house — real marriage is an all in, nothing-held-back commitment.

There are times when we have no choice but to go all in. A tattoo has no trial period; once the needle pierces your skin, you're all in. If a parachutist leaps from the plane and then has second thoughts, it's too late — he's all in. Even with something as trivial as a new cellphone, once you've signed the 2-year service contract, you are all in and at the mercy of your cellular service provider.

God was all in with his Son, Jesus.

God himself was pleased to live fully in his Son. And God was pleased for him to make peace by sacrificing his blood on the cross, so that all beings in heaven and on earth would be brought back to God. — Colossians 1:19-20, CEV

In the same way that God went all in with his Son, we, too, must go all in with God. Faith is an all in proposition. Yes, we may have doubts, but we may not hold anything back. Yes, we may have questions, but we can't fail to respond to God's call on our hearts and lives.

Faith can be small and weak, but what there is has to be lived out boldly, not clinging to what is safe, not standing back from controversy and danger, but risking everything by trusting God with everything.

That's why Peter, to his great credit, got out of the boat and walked on water.

In Matthew 14:22, Jesus sent the disciples rowing across the Sea of Galilee while he stayed behind to pray. Later that night while the disciples were straining against heavy winds, Jesus walked across the lake beside them. The disciples were terrified and thought they were seeing a ghost. Not Peter. He challenged Jesus to let him, too, walk on the water and Jesus said, "Come on!"

It's true that Peter soon regretted what he had done and panicked. But for a few moments there, Peter was all in, and in those few moments Jesus showed him what true faith really looked and felt like.

I'll be honest with you: I would not have stepped over the side of that boat. I'm too self-protective, too slow to trust God in situations where my mind screams at me to be cautious. I am all in with God when it's easy, but when things get hard I have a tendency to pull back, to hesitate. I think a lot of us live that way.

Later in the same letter to the Colossians, Paul wrote this:

And now, just as you accepted Christ Jesus as your Lord, you must continue to follow Him. Let your roots grow down into Him, and let your lives be built on Him. Then your faith will grow strong in the truth you were taught, and you will overflow with thankfulness. — Colossians 2:6-7, NLT

Let your roots grow down into Jesus, let your life be built on Jesus — these are metaphors describing a lifelong process. As I live more and more boldly in Christ, my faith grows stronger. As I see God at work in my life, I'm less inclined to be panicked by the waves crashing around me.

Over time our faith grows, our faith is strengthened, our faith learns that God is trustworthy.

Hebrews 12:2 says that we learn to be all in by "keeping our eyes on Jesus." Instead of locking my gaze on the source of my fears and doubts, I keep my eyes on the source of my hope. He is trustworthy, he sets our hearts at peace, he is sovereign over everything, especially those things that are beyond my control.

Faith is not for the fainthearted. Christians never know what lies ahead in life, but we go all in, trusting in the name of Jesus, trusting God to lift us off the runway when we pull back on the yoke.

We have been redeemed through the blood of Christ; our sins have been forgiven through the abundant grace God lavishes upon us. — Ephesians 1:7-8a

Every now and then we get a real frog strangler of a rain, one of those rains where the sky opens up and the streets overflow the curbs. Water pours off the hills and floods the stream bed below my house, where it rushes over boulders and sometimes spills its banks, carrying sediment and dead brush down the valley.

Our English word lavish comes from the old French word lavache, which means a torrential rain storm — a gully-washer. The Greek word Paul uses in Ephesians 1:8 to describe the dimensions of God's grace means a quantity far in excess of what's needed to do the job.

Paul wants us to understand that God has done no small or common thing; God has unleashed a super-abundant and overflowing love, a generous and ongoing act of forgiveness that spills over the walls of our hearts and threatens to wash us away with its cleansing power.

I have sometimes said of a torrential rain, "What a waste!" Water is precious here in the desert, so we tend to be parsimonious with it. We use low-flow shower heads and toilets, drip irrigation, waste water reclamation and rain water collection systems to get the most from every drop of water. If I were a rainmaker, I would probably drop just enough rain to soak the earth, but no more.

By comparison, God seems to prefer grand and excessive gestures, going much farther and doing much more than is necessary. That same Greek word which describes God's lavish grace is used in the Gospels to describe the twelve baskets-full of leftovers after Jesus fed the 5,000. He miraculously multiplied 5 loaves and 2 fish — that in itself was a mind-blowing act of providence. But the miracle went far beyond what anyone could have imagined, as if God was determined that no one should be able to say, "I'm still hungry!"

This lavishness points to something remarkable about God's nature: he loves us lavishly, excessively, not merely over and above what we deserve, but far beyond anything we could ever hope for.

It seems to be in my nature to be stingy. I jealously guard what I have. I reluctantly share my time, my money, my resources, myself, as if I'm afraid I'll run short. I willingly accept God's torrential downpour of love and forgiveness while too often withholding my own from others.

Why is God so generous to me, when I have done nothing to deserve it? Why do I so often fail to respond in kindness, compassion and forgiveness toward the people I meet every day?

God acts according to his nature, and so do I. I would like to think of myself as a good person, but I am frequently petty and unkind towards those who could benefit from a little kindness in a cruel world.

Love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you! In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For He gives His sunlight to both the evil and the good, and He sends rain on the just and the unjust alike. — Matthew 5:44-45, NLT

If we are true children of God, we will love others lavishly, just as God has loved us. Easier said than done, of course. If I am becoming more generous, it is a work that God is accomplishing in me as I put my faith in Christ and lay aside my self-centered desires.

Imagine if we could learn to live and love and forgive lavishly. Imagine if we were thought of by friends, colleagues and loved ones as a torrential downpour of goodness, like a warm summer rain that saturates the earth and overflows the streams.

Photo credit: iStockphotos, Mac99

I don't much like the Walmart shopping experience, though. My Walmart is the size of the DFW Airport, but it doesn't have the cute little train to whisk you from Home Furnishings to Health and Beauty. You can cross time zones pushing your cart from Dairy Products to Automotive.

So the Walmart experience saves money but takes a lot of time. And you'll spend as much time waiting in line at the checkout as you spent hiking around the store in the first place.

Every Walmart is apparently required to have 77 checkout lines, but they never have more than 3 cashiers, since human beings are more expensive than machines. So I inevitably walk five miles for a gallon of anti-freeze only to wait another 40 minutes behind a long line of people with full shopping carts.

As I've studied the situation, I've realized that I am not being productive for American industry when I am waiting in line. If you extend my experience to everyone who waits in line every day at one of our nation's half-million Walmarts, K-Marts, Targets, IKEAs, Costcos, etc., you can quickly see why the American economy is deader than a conch — we're all standing around trying to get through the checkout line.

And don't even get me started on the Department of Motor Vehicles!

But I have a plan to put America back to work and increase our productivity. It's called FLAWD: Faster Lines At Walmart, Dagnabbit! (This is a family-friendly blog.)

Under FLAWD, everyone who currently receives an unemployment check will be required to put in 25 hours a week doing checkout duty at the local Walmart or big box equivalent. Our generous federal government would provide these workers free of charge. All the bigboxes would have to do is train them and set them loose on those checkout lines. With 14 million out of work and climbing, we could put every able-bodied American behind a cash register today!

It's win-win: the unemployed get the pride of working, and American workers get out of the checkout lines and back to the factory floor to make more widgets. And when all these new cashiers aren't busy checking people out, they can sweep up around their station and maybe read the latest news on Jennifer Aniston's new boyfriend.

I can hear the nay-sayers now. With free cashiers, what would keep Walmart from firing their existing checkout employees? There's a simple solution to that. To receive these government-paid cashiers, store managers would have to swear on their mother's grave not to get rid of current employees.

Either that, or we could create a tiny little subsidiary of the Labor Department called the Department of Checkout Lane Inspections, give it a few billion dollars and a large supply of paper for forms and regulations, and do what Washington does best: micro-manage everything.

I think we should try the promise thing.

Anyway, that's just one of my excellent plans to get the American economy moving again. Once I get a few more ideas worked out, I plan to call a joint session of Congress to explain my program. Keep watching this space for more details!

Photo credit: Macro/micro Brooklyn

The Greek heroes were mighty because the blood of the gods ran in their veins. They had courage because few mortals could best them in a fight. They were honored because they fought alongside men with the strength of the gods.

On September 11, 2001, the heroes of United Airlines flight 93 were, by comparison, a weak and unremarkable group. They were ordinary men and women on a regularly scheduled flight to San Francisco engaged in one of the mundane routines of modern life — flying cross-country for business, or to visit friends, or returning home from a quick trip to the east coast.

They boarded their flight anticipating yet another quietly tedious flight. But when the doors were sealed, they became snagged in an extraordinary web of evil planned by a determined group of violent men. The passengers and crew of United 93 confronted that evil heroically, in the best traditions of the Greek heroes, losing their lives in a vicious battle but still managing to defeat the terrorists who had commandeered their flight.

United 93 had been delayed in heavy outbound traffic. By the time it was finally airborne, the horrific violence planned by the jihadist squads in the other three planes was already being played out. Five minutes after United 93 lifted off, American Airlines flight 11 exploded into the upper stories of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Once the terrorists took control of United 93, passengers made frantic telephone calls to loved ones and were informed of the horrific attacks in New York and Washington. The realization of the evil planned for them by the jihadists must have dawned on these men and women like an unfolding nightmare. They were faced with a choice none of them really wanted to make: to sit passively and await their fate, or fight back and attempt to thwart the hijackers' plans.

The passengers of UA 93, by comparison, held no similar hatred for Islam or the Middle East. Few likely knew much at all about the growing Islamic jihadist movement being fueled by the grandiose political and religious aspirations of a wealthy Saudi named Osama bin Laden, his al-Qaeda terror organization, and its Wahhabi allies.

In fact, the passengers on board UA 93 likely never understood the aims of the angry young men who had taken over their plane. Their eventual decision to regain control of the aircraft was neither political nor religious. They acted from a very human desire to save themselves and each other, but more than that, they were clearly responding to a sense of responsibility, a sense of duty, to do all that could be done to try to save the lives of those they did not know somewhere up ahead in Washington, D.C.

They threw themselves at men wielding knives with nothing more than pots of hot water, fire extinguishers and their own bodies. They courageously rushed the hijackers and attempted to storm the cockpit, but in the ensuing fight the hijackers deliberately dove the plane into the ground in a meadow not far from Shanksville, PA.

The jihadists burned with hatred for the West, hatred for America and hatred for non-Muslims. It was hatred that pushed them through months of training and hatred that led them to sacrifice themselves and so many innocents in the cause of jihad.

In contrast, the passengers and crew of United 93 were spurred to action by love. That must sound strange. They surely had no love for the evil men who had spilled innocent blood in New York, Washington, and now in the very aisles of the plane they were trapped in. Nevertheless, it was their love of life, their love for each other, and their love for the untold numbers of innocents at risk in Washington that motivated these ordinary men and women to act heroically.

Heroism is always an act of love. It is a willful decision to put someone else's safety and well-being ahead of your own, to set aside self-interest and self-preservation for the good of another.

Jesus said many very difficult things. Among them is this insight into the nature of love:

There is no greater love than to lay down one's life for one's friends. — John 15:13, NLT

Jesus was attempting to explain something about his own death, which was but hours away when he spoke these words. But he was also establishing a principle meant to govern how we live together as a just and humane society. Life is a precious gift from God, and we all have within us a very good and necessary desire to guard this gift and keep it from harm.

But the miracle of love is even more precious — and rare — than the miracle of life. Love is not some silly romantic notion or warm feeling, nor is it a lofty and unattainable ideal — love is a moral north star that compels us to place the needs and well-being of others before ourselves.

Love is self-sacrificing; love is outward rather than inwardly focused; love is courageous. Love is not content to stand on the sidelines and watch; it must act, and when it acts, it is ready to takes risks for the benefit of others.

The heroes of United 93, gone ten years now, would have preferred to have stepped off that plane safely in San Francisco and live out their natural lives in quietness and peace. The hijackers didn't give them that option. So the brave men and women on board that plane collectively swallowed their fears and regrets, ignored their slim chance of success and came together as a team committed to supporting each other to the end. They charged for the front of the plane and kept on charging, until they could do no more.

On this tenth anniversary of their brave sacrifice, may they inspire us to live boldly and heroically, guided in everything we do by the north star of God's love.

Photo credit: The New York Times

With so many proton collisions, I wonder what becomes of all that subatomic debris? Maybe a team of highly-trained janitors armed with giant Swiffers hike around the collider's 17-mile underground circuit every night, sweeping up all the bits of mangled subatomic waste. Or maybe they hose the tunnels down, washing all that subatomic cruft into the municipal sewer system? Officials are understandably tight-lipped about how they dispose of all that atomic waste.

But I digress.

What's the point of all this destruction? The LHC is searching for a very important little particle known as the Higgs boson.

The Higgs mechanism is a theoretical process that may give subatomic particles their mass. The leading explanation for the Higgs mechanism is that it arises from the properties of a particle named the Higgs boson. But among the exotic catalog of subatomic stuff predicted by the current models, everything has been documented except for the elusive Higgs boson. It may be shy, or it may not exist at all.

That is what the LHC was designed to find out. By smashing enough protons together, physicists should find the Higgs boson, if it exists. Or, failing to find it, they hope to rack up enough unfruitful searches to prove that the Higgs mechanism doesn't need a new particle to do its mass magic.

When all the money has been spent and all the research finished, what these physicists will be left with is a theory supported by somewhat stronger evidence than some different theory.

In other words, they're not going to snap a photo of a particle with the name "Higgs" tattooed to its backside. They won't be able to hold a Higgs particle in their hands or smell it with their noses. Their evidence will be a few oddball data points in a sea of numbers, or it will be something even less conclusive: the absence of those data points.

Unlike the frog, the evidence for the Higgs boson won't be concrete or tactile. It will be mathematical and probabilistic, and those numbers and probabilities will always have within them an unavoidable degree of uncertainty and doubt.

Werner Heisenberg said that in the realm of subatomic particles, the very act of taking a peek alters the thing you are studying. For this and other reasons, much of quantum physics depends on probabilities rather than certainties.

Of course, it's human nature to want to nail things down and find solid ground to stand on. Physicists are only human, so they often speak with great certainty about the unseen world they study, when much of what is "known" of the invisible structures of the material universe is nothing more than a set of conjectures built on probabilities.

And that, when you think about it, is a pretty good definition for faith.

Now faith means putting our full confidence in the things we hope for, it means being certain of things we cannot see. It was this kind of faith that won their reputation for the saints of old. And it is after all only by faith that our minds accept as fact that the whole scheme of time and space was created by God's command — that the world which we can see has come into being through principles which are invisible. — Hebrews 11:1-3, JB Phillips

Faith is a conscious decision to act as if the invisible God is real. It means living with certainty about something you can't truly be certain about.

God is other. He is nothing like us and we are nothing like him. We are made in his image, but we don't share the essential characteristics of his being — we are finite creatures bound to a material world, but God is an eternal and infinite spiritual being. We cannot observe God, we cannot touch him or interact with him in any of the ways we're accustomed to.

But we can look for evidence of God in what we see around us and inside of us — the earth and stars, the visible and invisible physical world, the miracle of life, the wonder of consciousness, the mystery of love, the historical persistence of morality, the extravagant and superfluous beauty of creation, the rigorous order imposed on the material realm in the midst of great complexity — and as we consider these characteristics of the world and our own human experience, we can ask if these wonders are better explained as the handiwork of a creative, omnipotent God, or as the byproducts of a long and remarkable streak of very good luck.

Faith is not an emotional impulse, but an intellectual decision. The big lie about faith is that it requires the suspension of rational thought; the truth is that faith, as lived by the men and women of the Bible, is built around their personal experiences of God and the testimonies of trusted witnesses. Faith comes through a process of testing the evidence for and against. It never requires eliminating all doubt or suspending disbelief. Faith leads us to conclude that the evidence in favor of God outweighs the evidence in opposition.

This is exactly the process the scientific community will go through once the LHC has finished its Higgs experiments. As the findings are presented, however they shake out, there will be some who will take advantage of ambiguities in the evidence to take a dissenting view. The findings may seem ironclad, but a few will keep looking for a loophole.

God challenges us to examine the evidence for faith. Jesus lived and witnesses wrote about his life so that we can judge his words, judge his character, judge whether the claims he made are more likely true than false. Faith requires a sifting of the evidence in favor of God and an honest appraisal of the evidence against him.

And if, in the end, we conclude that God is all that he has revealed himself to be in the Scriptures, faith becomes the way we begin to live in response to that conclusion.

It will take as great an act of the intellect, the heart and the will to believe in the Higgs boson as is needed to believe in the God of the Bible and his Son, Jesus Christ. The difference is that the Higgs boson, as interesting as it may be, has no power to transform us or the life we live.

God's promise is that if we live by faith, we will experience life in an entirely new way. Faith creates the possibility of living in a relationship with the God who created the universe, the God who created you and me, the God who even dreamed up a shy little subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson.

Photo credit: BBC News