The Grip

Your Grip is everything

Your grip in golf is everything. If your grip is to hard the club becomes unpredictable and with the slightest turn of your wrist can cause your shot to become as deadly as a stray bullet with no target. If your grip is too loose the club may wind up going farther than your ball traveled. For decades golf professionals have debated what grip to use. There is the over lapping, the interlocking, the baseball grip, the over lapping/interlocking grip. The list goes on and on. Every golfer has his or her own variations to it. But one thing is for certain you don’t want it too tight or too loose. There is that fine line you have to walk in finding that right grip. You want to make sure it is perfect or as close to perfect as you can get. At the same time it has to be comfortable for you. You need to find that one grip that every time you pick up a club it is the most comfortable feeling in the world. You should feel ready for any lie that you are in.

Life is the same way. We have the tendency to live the same way. We hold onto things in our life that we are almost smothering ourselves. We try to control every situation in our own way that we think is best. We grip life so tightly that soon it becomes so stiff and rigid and the results frustrate us because nothing seems to be going as it should. A white knuckled approach to life is not always the smartest thing for our own life because we have control issues. We look for things in our life that we can control. Just a simple thing like what we eat or even what we drink has a profound ability to give us control. If we can control aspects in our life we feel that our grip on life is perfect. In our lives our grip can mean everything. When it is so tight that we hold onto every situation with such fervor and determination that when we do not reach the desired results that we are so frustrated and become enraged with the outcome. This plays off in the rest of the situations in our life. It throws our game completely off and we have no way of “getting it together,” because our frustration just makes our grip tighter and tighter.

We have a tendency to hold our life with no grip at all. We just loosely hold on with no care at all. We approach situations with absolutely no care in the world at all. We fire away at whatever comes our way with no result. We try so hard sometimes to get the desired result we want but with no grip we winding throwing away some of life’s best situations. It doesn’t matter what it is. We just swing away not caring at all what happens. We have this passive, “whatever” attitude. But when there is nothing left in our hands but that empty and alone feeling it hits us. We have just thrown away every opportunity that had the chance to be great just because of our blasé attitude. We don’t change because we really don’t have the guts to change. We desire something different but we are ok if nothing ever changes. We don’t mind that we are stuck in this rut.

I have been in both situations. I have held on to the life that I felt that I loved so tightly that whenever a situation did not work out exactly just how I wanted or planned that frustration and anger seemed to be the only factor that was pervasive in my pursuit of what I thought was best. My grip on life was so tight that I somehow strangled myself almost to death. I loved my life that I was living so much that when the time came for it to change I fought it with every ounce of energy that I held. I was miserable. Everything in my life seemed to go wrong and I had nowhere to turn. I have also held onto life with a loose grip not caring for anything. It didn’t matter what happened I knew that I would find something to enjoy it. I found alcohol, girls, and jobs as ways to just fulfill my life with empty hollow emotions. It soon became evident that I took it all for granted. Didn’t matter what the cause and affects were from my actions, I did what I thought was best for me. I destroyed my body, memory, and pride with drinking. I thought it would make me forget about the pain I had in my life. I thought it would numb my senses but all it did was destroy my liver, and made me feel worse in the morning than when I started drinking. I took for granted every relationship that I had thinking that they would always be there no matter what decisions I made. I drove friends away, made a rift in my own family make up, and made myself off limits to the women that deep inside made me feel love for but yet never knew. My loose grip on life killed jobs. I could have cared less if I didn’t get paid or what my boss thought of me. I could have cared less about my future and just went through the motions of the day to make them pass by faster.

Both grips seemed uncompromising in my own life. They both had massive negatives that stared me in the face. They both led me down parts of life that I regret. But when God came in my life my grip changed. My swing changed. Everything about this game of life changed completely. I didn’t grip the club to soft or too tight. I held on enough to care but not enough to try to control every aspect of my life. I didn’t overexert my self and try to live like I felt I needed to live. I didn’t over swing. It was natural. Because I wasn’t in control. I let the club do the work and that was good enough for me. I took it all in. I matured and tried not to do anything that I myself was not alone and allowed Christ to take control and allow his game to become mine. I became patient and waited on him. Not that everything became easy in life, but life became easier to live. The game itself became something that I did not mind to be apart of and I did not play it the way that I felt it should be played but I played it Gods way. I still have to watch my grip but now its worth it.
The grip, not to soft...not too tight, but just right.