Along with April showers and May flowers, spring brings baseball. I follow three major league baseball teams—the St. Louis Cardinals and Kansas City Royals (whose fandom I acquired growing up in Missouri), and my local team, the Colorado Rockies.

Last season all three finished dead last in their respective divisions. But a fresh year births new hope! Currently the Royals are in second place, but the Cardinals and Rockies remain in the rear. Hopefully they’re pacing themselves for a long pennant run.

Fans pray for our teams. Mostly in desperation—please not last place again! When a team goes from last to first we call it a miracle, but I’m convinced last to first mostly involves good pitching. Still, I appreciate audacious sports prayers.

Jabez offered up an audacious prayer of his own: Oh, that you would enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain.

Then the amazing response—God granted his request.

Jabez sounds like the Hebrew word for pain. His mother named him that after giving birth in great distress. Maybe Jabez feared pain growing up (or maybe he was a Rockies fan). Along with freedom from pain, Jabez also brazenly asked for more land, greater influence and freedom from harm.

One side of me doesn’t believe Jabez’s prayer is proper, not modest enough. It’s simply too in God’s face. Then I’m afraid of what enlarged territory might look like in my life. Do I want more responsibility?

It took faith and desperation to pray such an audacious prayer, and yet the Lord answered in the affirmative. God may not grant baseball prayers, but if we cry out to him like Jabez you and I might be surprised at his response.

1 Chronicles 4 in Through the Bible in 2024

Photo by Lesly Juarez