YOU WERE MADE
FOR THE FIGHT.

You were made for the fight.

God built you for this. He gave you hands that can learn to square up a ball thrown from 60 feet, 6 inches, eyes that can learn to pick up spin, and a heart that pounds when the game is on the line. None of it came finished. He gave you the gifts and a lifetime of days to train them.

The fight is coming whether you train for it or not. The best hitters in the world make an out about seven times in ten. Someday you’ll strike out with the bases loaded or walk the nine hitter on four pitches. A coach will cut you, bench you, or bat you ninth, and the kid across the field will be bigger and faster and already have the offer. What you do then is up to you.

What was David doing before he faced Goliath?

David was the youngest of Jesse’s eight sons, and his job was watching the family’s sheep. When the prophet Samuel came to Bethlehem to anoint one of Jesse’s sons as the next king, Jesse brought seven of them in front of him and left David out in the field. God passed over every one of the older brothers and told Samuel, “man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” They had to send for David, and he was the one God chose (1 Samuel 16:1-13).

Some time later, Israel’s army was camped across a valley from the Philistines. Every morning and every evening for forty days, a giant named Goliath walked out and dared anyone in Israel to fight him, and nobody would. David’s father sent him to the camp with food for his brothers. When David heard Goliath, he said he would go. King Saul looked at him and said, “You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him; for you are but a youth, and he has been a man of war from his youth” (1 Samuel 17:16-33).

David answered with what he had done in the pasture. When a lion or a bear took a lamb from the flock, he went after it and took the lamb back out of its mouth, and when the animal turned on him, he killed it. “Your servant has killed both lions and bears,” he told Saul, and “The Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine” (1 Samuel 17:34-37).

Saul put his own armor on David, but David had never trained in it and couldn’t move in it, so he took it off. He went down to the brook, picked out five smooth stones, and walked out with his sling and his shepherd’s staff. Goliath came at him with a sword, a spear, and a javelin. David told him, “I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts,” and ran straight at him. It took one stone (1 Samuel 17:38-50).

The part of the story you don’t hear about is David fighting the lions and bears while protecting the sheep. Scripture doesn’t mention anybody watching those fights. There was no crowd at the edge of the pasture and nobody keeping score. David built his courage out there, years before anybody in Israel knew his name, and when the big day came he walked out with the gear he’d trained with and nothing else.

Most people build their belief on the underdog stories, but the part of David’s story that gets you ready is the part that comes before the giant. For a ballplayer, the lions and bears are the tee work before school, the bullpen in January when it’s 30 degrees, and the throwing program on the day you don’t feel like it. That’s where you get ready for the day with the bases loaded.

Are some players just born tough?

You’re 0-for-3 going into your last at-bat. The tying run is on second, two outs, and the dugout is up on the rail. On the walk from the on-deck circle a thought shows up: Some guys are clutch. I’m not one of them.

That thought tells you toughness is something you’re either born with or born without, so there’s nothing to do but hope.

Your brain doesn’t work that way. Every rep you take sends an electrical signal down a path in your brain. Your brain answers by wrapping that path in insulation called myelin, so the next signal travels faster and arrives on time. When adults learned to juggle, scans showed that the wiring linking their eyes and hands had changed.¹ Mice that couldn’t build new myelin couldn’t master a complicated running wheel.² The brain has to build new wiring to learn a new skill.

Toughness gets built the same way a swing gets built: one focused rep at a time.

Your brain insulates whatever you repeat, good or bad. Twenty swings at game speed with a purpose build a better path than a hundred lazy ones. The same goes for what you do after a strikeout. Slam the helmet every time and you’re training the slam.

It also takes longer than most people think. When people worked on making one new daily habit automatic, it took anywhere from 18 days to 254 days, and missing a single day didn’t set anyone back.³ Building toughness takes a season, and then more seasons. One bad day doesn’t erase it.

So when that thought shows up on the walk to the plate, you know it’s lying. You’ve been building the wiring for that at-bat every day you took a real rep.

The Word

Years after the pasture, when David was king, he wrote a song about where his strength came from: “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle” (Psalm 144:1). He gave God the credit for his training, the same way he did when he told Saul about the lion and the bear. The hands God trains now are the ones that grip the seams and turn the barrel. Write “Ps 144:1” inside your glove or on the knob of your bat.

Scripture has another fighter. Saint Michael the Archangel is named in the books of Daniel, Jude, and Revelation. In Revelation, “war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon” (Revelation 12:7). The dragon was the devil, and he lost and was thrown out of heaven.

The name Michael means “Who is like God?” in Hebrew, and the answer is nobody. Goliath isn’t, and neither is the ace with the 90-mile-an-hour fastball, the 0-for-3, or the voice telling you you’re not clutch. That question is the cue on this chapter’s Battle Card. When Saint Michael argued with the devil over the body of Moses, he didn’t trade insults. All he said was “The Lord rebuke you,” and he left the judging to God (Jude 9).

In 1886 Pope Leo XIII added a prayer to Saint Michael to the prayers said at the end of Mass. It starts, “Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.” Catholics around the world prayed it after Mass until the 1960s, and in 1994 John Paul II asked people not to forget it.⁴ It’s printed at the front of the book and on the Battle Card, and it fits in the 20 seconds before the first pitch.

Orders

Write your gift list and your identity statement

Do this tonight, on paper, before you go to bed.

1. Write “My gifts” at the top of a page. List ten things God gave you that you use in baseball. Put down your body: your arm, your eyes, your speed, your size or lack of it. Put down your mind. Put down the people: the coach who stays late, the parent who drives you to the field, the teammate who catches your bullpens.
2. Under the list, write one sentence that says who you are. It has to be true on a 4-for-4 night and on an 0-for-4 night. Use your own name. For example: “I am [your name], a son of God. I compete one pitch at a time, I’m willing to do the work, and I let it go when it’s over.”⁵
3. Read your identity statement every morning this week. Say it on the walk to the plate or the mound.
4. Keep the gift list in your bat bag. Add to it when you notice a new one.

Your plan: If ___, then I ___. Example: If I hear “you’re not clutch” in my head on the walk to the plate, then I say my identity statement and step in.

Pray the Saint Michael Prayer before the game

Pray it before the first pitch of every game, before introductions and before the national anthem. Saint Michael was a warrior and an underdog who went on to beat a higher angel and become the commander of God’s armies because he chose to serve. He said simply, “Serviam” (“I will serve”), when Lucifer said, “Non serviam” (“I will not serve”).⁶

Pitchers, keep one line for the mound.

Your plan: If ___, then I ___. Example: If I give up a home run, then I walk to the back of the mound, say, “Saint Michael, defend us in battle,” and get back on the rubber.

Keep a pasture calendar

Pick one rep you’ll do every day that nobody will see. It could be 25 dry swings at game speed, your throwing program, or ten minutes on the tee. Put a calendar on your wall and mark every day you do it. Plan on keeping it up for months.³

Your plan: If ___, then I ___. Example: If I miss a day, then I do the rep first thing the next morning so I don’t miss two.

The day the stone misses

David picked up five stones and needed one. You’ll need more than that.

Some night you’ll swing at a slider in the dirt with the season on the line. You’ll throw an 0-2 fastball down the middle and watch it leave the park. You’ll boot the ground ball with the tying run on third and hear the other dugout let you have it. The pasture gets you ready for the fight, but it doesn’t promise you’ll win it.

Toughness gets tested after that, on the bus ride home, in your bedroom, and in the cage the next afternoon, while the play keeps running in your head.

On August 29, 1993, the Cleveland Indians knocked a Yankees pitcher out of the game in the fourth inning. He had been born without a right hand. His next start was six days later, against the same lineup.

What do you do with your six days?

Battle Card: Article 1

Cover the right column. Say each one from memory.

Notes

1. Scholz, J., Klein, M. C., Behrens, T. E. J., & Johansen-Berg, H. (2009). Training induces changes in white-matter architecture. Nature Neuroscience, 12(11), 1370-1371. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2412 . See also Fields, R. D. (2015). A new mechanism of nervous system plasticity: Activity-dependent myelination. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(12), 756-767. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn4023 (research/02 #19).
2. McKenzie, I. A., et al. (2014). Motor skill learning requires active central myelination. Science, 346(6207), 318-322. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1254960 (research/02 #19).
3. Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674 (research/02 #42; research/07 #40).
4. Prayer to Saint Michael, history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_to_Saint_Michael ; John Paul II, Regina Caeli, April 24, 1994 (Italian): https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/it/angelus/1994/documents/hf_jp-ii_reg_19940424.html ; Catholic Encyclopedia, “Saint Michael the Archangel”: https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10275b.htm (research/01 #38-39).
5. Identity statement template, research/04 #45, built on Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., et al. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(2), 304-324. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035173 (research/04 #14).
6. The serviam and non serviam exchange comes from Christian tradition, not from the text of Scripture. “Non serviam” (“I will not serve”) is the Latin Vulgate of Jeremiah 2:20, a line about Israel that tradition applied to Lucifer’s fall, and Saint Michael’s answer belongs to the same tradition, as do Lucifer’s higher rank and Saint Michael’s command of God’s armies. The war in heaven is in Revelation 12:7-9.