I have spent a lot of time lately teaching my son about leadership. For reasons that won’t make sense for a few months me and him have been going out daily and playing catch and discussing what a leader is and how to be a leader. I told him I am not raising a ball player I am raising a leader who plays ball. 

I stayed away from writing for a while as I have stated because of other things going on in my life that I didn’t want to bleed over into my writing until I understood what I was doing and why.

As I have been teaching my son to be a leader. I have been instilling in him that as a man more than anything else your reputation is the most important part of being a man. No matter how rich or poor, no matter what car you drive or the lady you decide to marry. Your reputation is everything as a man. Your reputation will help you find the right lady. Your reputation will help you find or keep friends. As a man your reputation is the most important thing you can have.

As a ball player, no matter the sport having a good reputation will advance you further than any amount of talent. We have started looking into things like travel ball and when you start down that road you have to realize it’s not your talent that will get you on a good team. It’s your reputation and your parents’ reputation also. A coach is looking for a player that they can coach and if you have a reputation of yelling at your coach or not listening to them why would the good teams’ coach want to deal with you?

Why did I start teaching my son about reputation and leadership so young? Well, it’s because of a major shift in my own life brought on by an odd source.

It was the eve of the new pope being elected and my two favorite podcasters were doing a joint podcast. So there I am listening to a sports podcast and two gentlemen who honestly I know both have pretty liberal views on religion and God. These two start discussing a friend of the two of them that I also listen to here and there. The one is a Bible verse or two shy of almost sharing the Gospel in this heavily watched podcast by discussing how this other person was to be around. He was so impressed by the way he lived his life and just his testimony alone caused this man to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ without realizing he was doing so. This actually impressed me and then convicted me.

Who in the world would look at me and be like that guy there makes me want to tell others about his walk with God. Then this caused me to do something even weirder. I started asking others who were in my circle of influence that I saw a difference in compared to the others around us, where they went to church. I wanted to know where the people who I can point at without even asking if they were Christian and just know it, where they went to church.

I was surprised that almost all but one said the same place. It interested me and when I asked where they went every single one of them looked at me and said Hey come visit you will fit right in with us.

At first, I brushed it off because I was where I belonged but over time I started to see that I was not where I belonged. The reasons added up until I saw that I needed to move on and find a place I could grow and be like those other people I knew around me that you can point to and say that person is a Christian. Their reputation preceded them in this manner and because of their reputation I found myself wanting to not be them but to have a reputation like them.

I did not leave my church because I wanted to be like the others around me. I wanted that aura around me like they had but I wanted to make sure I was in a place where I believed what was being said from the platform. I left my church because I no longer agreed with things being said from that platform. We also had a bullying issue going on that I did not feel would stop unless we walked away. So we left.

This situation is a big reason why I stopped writing because I did not want to misrepresent why we made the decision we did or let my emotions on the subject take over because at one point I would have let all the tea loose and named names and gone off. That is where I had to protect my reputation because I’m sure someone from that church will see this blog and report back and that is fine I have no ill will toward any of them. I instead decided to spend my time researching what it was that I believe as a Christian. So I stopped writing and spent many nights questioning my belief system and trying to figure out what was a product of religion and what was a product of Jesus’ teaching. I made some changes to how I thought about a few things that at one point I’d have laughed at you about and now see church and religion a bit differently.

When I woke up from my coma I made a decision that I was going to change my reputation. Not that I had a bad one but at the same time it wasn’t a good one. So I hit the restart button and just did what I thought was right. Then I ran into a reputation that was so strong it had other people sharing the Gospel for them.

My wife doesn’t understand my and my son’s relationship half the time. I am so very hard on him and spend lots of time talking to him compared to the girls. The reason is that for a man reputations start young. You can kind of change your reputation over time but it starts young and who you are young bleeds over to who you are later in life. He has to learn early that what you put into things is what you will get out of them. I force him to play catch with me everyday and not just stand there because most baseball recruiters say that catch is where they evaluate players at the next level not in game but catch in warm ups. He doesn’t understand what I am doing but he knows that a leader must practice harder than everyone else. He knows a leader is not just catching a ball and throwing it back. A leader catches with purpose and throws back to the glove properly like a third Baseman hitting a first baseman’s mitt.

Reputations mean so much to all men. Understanding that we must guard our reputation and teach our children to not only guard theirs but also teach them how to build it properly is our job as men.

I am learning daily how to make my reputation to be something more than it is and at the same time learning to teach my children and in a weird way all the children I coach how to build a reputation. I hope that eventually I will have a reputation of teaching reputations.