Retired From Leading Prayer

Last night, I led my first, and last, Church League softball post-game prayer.  Traditionally, our team, as the only Catholic team in the league, defers to the other team for the post-game prayer.  The main reason for that is that most of the other teams have the Pastor, or a youth pastor or some elder on the team, whereas our priest and deacons do not play on the team (and most of the players on our team either aren't very religious or aren't even Catholic).  Plus, Catholics aren't well known for improvising prayers.  We're much better with the rote, memorized prayers.  But our reticence to pray has recently been altered.

A couple of games ago, our coach decided to lead the post-game prayer. As best as I can remember, here's his prayer:

         Lord, our judge, thank you for the gift of softball....and the camaraderie and for bringing us together this evening, Amen.

We hadn't walked 20 feet away from the prayer circle when one of my teammates started heckling him with, "Lord, our judge, thank you for the gift of softball?  What was that?"  Since then, we've been giving him a ton of crap about it.  Last week, we were having a cookout after the game, and we had a bunch of emails flying around giving each other shit.  I jumped in with a message saying the coach was working on our pre-meal prayer for the cookout:

        Lord, our judge, thank you for the gifts of softball, ground beef and processed pig snouts and anuses....

That got a few laughs.  Then, at the end of that game, coach put his brother-in-law in charge of the prayer.  He did a passable job, but the other team commented about it being short and sweet, like a prayer before a big meal. This week, however, was my turn, especially after I struck out swinging (with the excuse that I'd badly sprained my ankle the inning before).

I had already planned out two lines of the prayer.  Since it had been hotter than Hell this week, I started out, "Lord, thank you for this cool evening for us to come out and enjoy, and thank you for the heat this afternoon, to remind us of where we want to be for eternity....and thank you for the opportunity to come together and for the chance to be together on Sunday....Amen."

When I gave the line about eternity, one of my teammates started laughing.  Afterwards, the appropriateness of delivering one-liners in prayers was discussed, along with the fact that some of my teammates took that line to mean that I wanted to go to Hell, as opposed to the idea that the oppressive heat was a reminder to try to get to Heaven and avoid the fires of Hell.  it was also determined that I would no longer be charged with leading post-game prayers.