The Scoreboard Could Not Tell the Whole Story

The old scoreboard at Wattle Park Oval had two moods. On a good Saturday it showed the correct runs and wickets. On a difficult Saturday it showed the correct runs, the wrong wickets and a small collection of numbers nobody could explain. Graham had spent sixteen seasons keeping it reasonably honest.

He arrived before the players with a folding chair, a flask of tea and a pencil sharpened at both ends. He was seventy-one now and had surrendered most of his other committee duties. But he still loved the sound of a cricket ball striking a bat on a warm October morning.

The under-thirteens were playing. Graham's granddaughter Lucy had come along because her father was helping with the team and her mother was working. She was eleven, preferred books to sport and regarded the rules of cricket as an elaborate practical joke played upon the uninitiated.

“Why is that man out?” she asked after the first wicket. Graham explained the ball had struck the stumps. “And why is that other man still there when he missed it?” Graham explained that missing was not, by itself, a criminal offence. Lucy considered this a generous feature of the game.

She watched him record every delivery in the scorebook. A dot for no run. A little mark for a single. A carefully circled four. Nothing escaped the pencil. When a batter was dismissed Graham drew a neat line through the innings and wrote down the final number.

“So you know everything everybody did?” Lucy asked. “On the cricket field, more or less.” “Even the mistakes?” “Especially the mistakes. That's how you know what happened.” She leaned over the book. “It looks like school reports with extra numbers.”

By the drinks break one of the boys had made twenty-eight runs. Another had faced nine balls without scoring. Graham could see the second boy trying not to cry as he came off. He had practised for weeks and now stood beside the fence with his helmet hanging from one hand.

“He's not very good, is he?” Lucy said quietly. Graham watched the boy's father put an arm around his shoulders. “Not today,” he replied. “But he turned up. And he is learning. A score tells you something true about a game. It doesn't tell you everything true about a person.”

Lucy thought about that while they shared the biscuits her grandmother had packed. Then she asked a question that seemed to come from nowhere. “Does God keep a scorebook?”

Graham stopped with half a biscuit in his hand. “What makes you ask?” “At school we talked about doing good things. And my friend said if you do enough good things God lets you into heaven. So I wondered if He writes them all down. Like you do.”

Graham knew the question mattered more than his answer to the earlier one about leg-before-wicket. He also knew that children can recognise a speech being prepared for them from a remarkable distance. He closed the scorebook and looked across the oval.

“God knows what we do,” he said. “He knows the good and the wrong. He even knows what is in our hearts when nobody else can see it.” Lucy nodded slowly. “So that sounds worse than your scorebook.” “It would be if getting right with God depended on making our good column longer than our bad one.”

“Doesn't it?” she asked.

“No. The Bible tells us something much better. We can't make ourselves good enough to earn God's welcome. We all need forgiveness. Jesus came to save people who could never save themselves.” Graham paused. “There's a passage in Ephesians that says we are saved by grace through faith. It isn't something we earn. It's God's gift.”

Lucy looked at the boy who had made no runs. “Even if you've got a really bad score?” “Especially then you understand why a gift is good news.”

A shout went up from the field. Someone had hit the ball into the long grass beyond the boundary. Graham reopened the book and recorded six. Lucy watched the scorer's hand moving again. “But if God forgives us, does it matter if we're kind or if we tell lies?”

“It matters very much,” Graham said. “The same passage says God makes us His people for good works. But the order matters. We don't do good things to buy His love. We learn to do good things because He has shown us His love in Christ.”

Lucy considered this for a while. “So the good things are more like saying thank you?” “That's a fair beginning,” Graham said. “And sometimes saying thank you means changing how we treat somebody when we've been selfish or unkind.”

The next over produced two wides, a dropped catch and a run-out that was disputed by almost everybody except the umpire. Graham wrote it all down. Lucy watched him with fresh interest. “Do you ever get the score wrong?” “Frequently enough to keep me humble.” “Does God?” “No, love. That's why His mercy matters so much.”

Near the end of the innings the boy who had failed with the bat was sent out to field at deep square leg. A hard shot came towards him. He ran across the grass, slipped slightly and caught the ball just above the ground. The whole team cheered. The boy stood blinking at the ball in his hands as though it had chosen him by mistake.

Lucy sprang to her feet. “He did it!” Graham smiled. “He did.” The boy's earlier zero was still written plainly in the book. So was the catch he had taken. Neither number could contain the relief on his face or the delight of his teammates.

When the match ended Lucy helped fold the chairs. She was quiet on the drive home until they stopped at a set of lights. “Grandad, if I want to know more about Jesus, where should I start?”

Graham felt the familiar temptation to offer an impressive answer. He could have named several books, recommended a reading plan and explained why cricket was not a suitable illustration for every doctrine. Instead he said, “We could read one of the Gospels together. You can ask whatever you like. And we can ask the Lord to help us understand.”

“Even silly questions?” “Especially those. I've been asking them for years.”

That evening Graham put the scorebook back in its drawer. He had kept every run, wicket and extra as carefully as he could. It was a useful record of an ordinary Saturday. But it was not a measure of anybody's worth and it certainly was not a picture of how a sinner is received by God.

He opened his Bible to Ephesians 2 and read again the words he had tried to explain. Salvation was by grace. It came through faith. It was not the reward of a respectable life or a favourable final tally. It was God's gift in Jesus Christ. And the good works that followed were the fruit of that mercy, not its purchase price.

Graham thought of the boy with the zero and the catch. He thought of Lucy's question and his own long habit of measuring himself by how useful he had been. Then he prayed that both of them would learn to trust the Saviour rather than the scoreboard.