Beyond the Baseline

On December 31, 1972, Roberto Clemente boarded a cargo plane in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The Pittsburgh Pirates legend had just finished one of baseball's most remarkable careers — exactly 3,000 hits, twelve All-Star selections, two World Series rings. He could have spent New Year's Eve celebrating. Instead, he was loading relief supplies for earthquake victims in Managua, Nicaragua.

The plane crashed into the Atlantic shortly after takeoff. Clemente was thirty-eight years old.

What makes his story so piercing is not how he died, but why he was on that plane at all. Clemente had spent his entire career insisting that baseball was never the point. "If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that," he once said, "you are wasting your time on this earth."

He understood something that the Apostle Paul wrote to the Ephesians: we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which the Almighty prepared in advance for us to do. Our talents are never the destination. They are the vehicle.

Clemente could hit a baseball like few humans who ever lived. But he knew that gift was meant to carry him somewhere — toward the people who needed what he could give.

Some of us are still polishing the vehicle when God is asking us to drive it somewhere. Your purpose is not your talent. Your purpose is what your talent was made to serve.