Jon

Husband. Father. Chaplain. Veteran. Tweets mine.

[Jon @jon_van_dop]

Every time someone RTs someone/something they disagree with, they promote that thing. Dont elevate that which should be ignored.

[Jon @jon_van_dop]

@LadyDemosthenes

[Jon @jon_van_dop]

@dgasper24 That was a symbol, not just a song.

[Jon @jon_van_dop]

@Ineverglow

[Jon @jon_van_dop]

@MixtapeTheology @AndrewPeterson and @CarolynArends - they could take us to the deep end of the pool in the most beautiful way.

[Jon @jon_van_dop]

@revduke As a resident of Wisconsin, there are many questions.

[Jon @jon_van_dop]

@Glace_91 @paolini

[Jon @jon_van_dop]

@craigadams49 Ok, but the turtles sign more or less covers it.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

I watched a small boy strike out in a little league game.

Three swings. Three misses. The ball did not come near the bat.

He walked back to the bench with the walk of a man who had lost the war and remembered, mid-walk, that the walk was also part of the war.

I prepared to lower my eyes. In my country, a warrior who fails in the arena is granted the mercy of silence. It is the greatest kindness we know: to be permitted to disappear into your own defeat, without an audience.

Then the crowd stood up.

I mean the crowd. Grandmothers. Fathers. A woman with a walker, who used the walker for leverage. A man who had been on his phone until this exact moment, and would return to his phone the moment it was over, and would not remember later why he had stood.

They cheered him. Loud. Full-throated. In the tone reserved for a home run in the ninth of the seventh.

I turned to the man beside me, who was clapping with a beer in the hand he was clapping with — a difficulty I had not previously seen a man solve.

"What has he done?" I asked, because surely I had missed the play.

He said, "He swung."

He swung.

He had swung. Three times. At three balls he could not see, thrown by a boy who could also not see, in a field lit by a sun that answers to no one. And this country had stood up.

I understood then that this nation carries a secret theology, hidden inside a game for children. They do not applaud the outcome. They applaud the SWING. They applaud the willingness of a small boy to face what is coming and to take a full cut at it, and they do this loudest at the moment the swing has missed — because the miss is the only proof, in that instant, that he was ever brave enough to try.

The boy looked up. He was six. His mouth had begun to shake in the way mouths shake before they betray the man who owns them.

Then he heard the cheer.

He forgot how to cry.

He tipped his helmet, in the way he had seen a big-league player do it once on television. It was too big for his head, and it slipped, and he fixed it, and he walked to the bench again — and he was a different boy this time, and the walk was a different walk, and the war he had lost had become the war he had entered, and there is a distinction between those two things that eight hundred years of my family failed to write down.

The scoreboard has forgotten that at-bat.

He will remember it when he is sixty-six, at his own son's game, when another small boy strikes out in front of him, and he will be the first to stand.

I stood. Late. I stood anyway.

The man with the beer clinked his can against mine and said, "Attaboy."

He was not talking to me.

He was, entirely, talking to me.

[Jon @jon_van_dop]

@LadyDemosthenes @Based_Jedi It’s still here (there?).

[Jon @jon_van_dop]

@JennMGreenberg Funny how stupid and evil are so often found together

[Jon @jon_van_dop]

@JoshuaBarzon Upper left

[Jon @jon_van_dop]

@espn Just wanted to remind your announcers that the @Brewers are also playing in this game. You can talk about some of the good things they’re doing too.

[Jon @jon_van_dop]

@revduke I know some people on both sides of the aisle that would consider that heresy. Not me though. Thanks for keeping the main thing the main thing.

[Jon @jon_van_dop]

@BrandSanderson

[Jon @jon_van_dop]

@Brewers

[Jon @jon_van_dop]

@JennMGreenberg @SethDillon @PatriciaHeaton Gotta love chiastic structure.

[Jon @jon_van_dop]

@AdamMcCalvy I’m glad they had fun. Hilarious

[Jon @jon_van_dop]

@RyanNDanker Could top with strawberries or gravy.

[Jon @jon_van_dop]

@navarrotells Is the wnba going to start hiring goons?

[Jon @jon_van_dop]

@revduke @RayNothstine Yeah, this seems like a non-issue.