TERRY MOSHER
I’m back to the Boneyard today. As you know, when I have an excess of thoughts clogging my addled brain I need somewhere to dump some of the excess, and that is the Boneyard.
This may not be an original thought, but I can’t help believe that the best soccer team on the world stage – the World Cup – struggles to win. The game is set up, it seems to me, to allow inferior teams to use defensive strategies to give them a chance and if they can force penalty kicks pull out a stunning victory. Or just play it close enough that a few lucky breaks or bounces can produce an upset.
And there is an awful lot of flopping going on. I saw several players get hit in the hip, go down and grab an ankle and grimace as in serious pain. Most of the time nobody pays attention to them and they are forced to get up and resume play, usually after complaining to an official.
I’m not a student of the game. I really don’t like it. But it’s enjoyable to watch some of the world’s greatest players compete. And like in basketball, there is a lot of double and even triple-teaming of the best ones – Lionel Messi of Argentina, Christiano Ronaldo of Portugal (this guy is really, really good, and probably would be good in all the major American sports), Neymar da Silva Santos Junior of Brazil, Thomas Mueller of Germany and James Rodriguez of Colombia, to name just a few that I saw and admired.
Neymar suffered a back injury and is out of the rest of the World Cup, so it will be interesting to see how Brazil adjusts to his loss (and how Germany adjusts in the semifinals on Tuesday against Brazil).
This is a cheap shot, but it’s interesting that as soon as former club president Chuck Armstrong retired the baseball performance on the field improved dramatically. Is it a coincidence? Maybe. Or maybe Armstrong, who liked to have his finger on the pulse of baseball operations, interfered too much to the determent of the team’s performance?
We may never know that answer, but the fact is the Mariners are performing better than even the most optimistic of us media types guessed before the season started. It may be hard to catch the Moneyball Oakland A’s in the American League West, but the Mariners have a good shot at a wild card slot. And, as Dizzy Dean would have said, who before the season started would have “thunk it.”
This is also not an original thought, but it’s going to be tough for the Seahawks to repeat as Super Bowl champs. First of all, predicting that is about like picking winners in horse racing – there are too many abstract factors involved that makes it difficult.
First of all, the Seahawks not only have a big target on their backs as defending champions – they are going to get everybody’s best shot – but the rest of the NFL has taken noticed how Pete Carroll and John Schneider have constructed their team and will no doubt try to duplicate that with their team.
So expect more teams to balance their offense, maybe even slide to the side of a running attack like the Seahawks and cut back on passing so much. We all saw in the Super Bowl what happens when the greatest throwing quarterback maybe in the history of the NFL can chalk up a lot of passes and yardage and still be on the losing end of a 43-8 score.
In short, I expect the NFL to look different this coming season. Defense and more running attacks may move to the front, all of which will make it more difficult for the Seahawks to succeed as well as they did in marching to the Super Bowl championship.
I’m having a real tough time bouncing back from major surgery. It’s been eight weeks not and I’m still only about 60 percent (sometimes less then that and on a few days a little more then that) and it’s frustrating because I’m a type-A-plus, plus, plus personality who likes to work. I have been working since eight when I worked on a farm doing odd jobs. I’ve gone from mucking out stalls and bucking bales to best case-up worker a food processing plant every had to supervising meter proving trucks in the oil fields of Oklahoma and Kansas to running an office, being a business manager and for the last 44 years a sportswriter.
It’s tough not being able to do simple things sometimes. I hate it. I’ve looked out the window for hours at a time watching various birds, squirrels and raccoons play on the trees and I get very jealous. I want to be working, or at least roaming free, free as those birds.
But life is what it is.
These types of situations at this age (107) make you see the end of the tunnel, that’s for sure. It makes you understand quite clearly the various stages of life, and pushes you to realize that you are in sudden-death overtime with life hanging in the balance of a missed three or failed tip in, or a failed penalty kick.
There is a chance I could rebound and wish I hadn’t said these things. But the truth is that regardless of what I say I am only here by the Grace of God, and if he says Mosher c’mon down, it’s not to play the TV game show “Price is Right”, but it’s to cross back over to what I call “home.”
So I’m in sudden-death overtime waiting to see what God has in store for me.
You know, what is really sad, for me, is thanks to Facebook I have discovered some friends or close associates are not Believers. It’s depressing for me to learn that, and has forced me some days to stay off Facebook so I can emotionally recover.
I have enough evidence to not just believe in God, but know he exists. The clinching evidence for me was when my granddaughter on May 26, 1989 – she was killed that day when a truck backed over her – said to me hours after her death, “Don’t Worry About Me, I Walk With The Grace Of God.”
It took me a year of intense research to finally conclude that she was an Angel sent here to straighten out our family. Mission accomplished. We are a much better collection of individuals and a better extended family.
The question that hangs in the air unanswered for me is why would God or somebody associated with God take the time and effort to do that? I’m not ungrateful, but just want an answer to what is a major riddle for me.
But in the bigger picture, it proved to me that God exists. So when I discover friends or associates are not believers, or when people like comic Bill Maher mocks religion and God, it really hurts me, and also raises another question, central to me: What are we doing here on Earth?
I believe that we all come to Earth on our own volition. It all starts with us as souls who desire to meld into one with God. That is the ultimate goal. To reach that state of perfection we need to improve our selves – our souls – so we pre-select parents and the proper situation on Earth that will allow us to improve that part of our selves that will lead us to that perfection.
Once we get here, we are closed off to what the reason for being here is and we as souls in a human body develop as normally as possible with social interaction and our environment.
The killer in all of this is that we have Free Will. So we are free like Maher to disown God. I believe, however, that as C.S. Lewis discovered in his search to disprove the existence of God – he found just the opposite – that because we have a conscience (soul) that tells us when we do something wrong, no matter how small, that there has to be a God that allows us to instinctively know that wrong from right.
What has always bothered me is why there is so much evil and bad things going on in this world. And they have been going on since the beginning of time. Is there that much strong Free Will that allows us as people to make bad, or evil, decisions that affect millions?
Apparently so.
And that leads me to think sometimes – more often than not – that the Hell the Bible speaks of is right here on Earth. We come here to experience pleasure and pain and along the way it seems like this could not be worse than any Hell the Bible speaks of.
By now you probably guessed I believe in reincarnation, which is not in the Bible, although some experts say it once was. Reincarnation is in the oldest religion, Hinduism, where it is known as Rebirth.
I believe that you reincarnate based on what you did in your previous life. If you slipped via Free Will on your march to perfection, then you go back to fix what you did in your next life. Of course, you could because of Free Will continue to screw up and make yourself even worse in your next life.
Which leads me to this: Have you ever experienced persons who are just so good that you feel peaceful around them? I have on several occasions in my long life, but only one who I was particularly close enough to that I knew for certain he was a higher soul, a person who was away head of me on his march to perfection.
That person was Ernie Bonar, who I worked with in Oklahoma back in the mid-60s. He could be grouchy, but, man, was he good. I loved being around him, and watch him take care of others, most of the time without many knowing what he had done.
Ernie died years and years ago and if he is coming back in a reincarnation it’s only because he is just a few steps away from melding back with God and needs that little extra push in his soul development.
As for me, I’m nowhere near perfection. I’m getting better, but that’s just my judgment. God’s judgment is the one that counts. And the way I feel right now, His judgment might not be too far behind.
Be well pal.
Be careful out there.
Have a great day.
You are loved.