We walked to the stream, my granddaughter Nassia and I, and as we lingered I started pitching stones at a tree on the other side. The tree was in diameter about 1 ½ feet, as I judged, and stood about 25 feet away.

Nassia was occupied with her own important endeavors, fashioning sailing boats of curvaceous fallen leaves. I was three for three in the first three chucks at the tree. Beginner’s luck.

The very execution of the motions was calling up an ancient part of me. I pondered the mysteries — how one coordinates hand and eye to cause a missile to arc just so as to end its journey on the narrow girth of a distant target.

As I wound up and delivered, I was intrigued by the exquisitely subtle micro-adjustments and corrections one makes in the split seconds before releasing the object, ensuring accurate dispatch of the payload. The strike-zone pitch is the refined endpoint of a thousand trial and error pitches of youth.

Then I realized that spiritual “skill” is not so different from physical skill: our “powers of discernment [are] trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Hebrews 5;14). It is only through a thousand little attempts at obedience that we are brought, by the Spirit through the Word, to a maturity in which we occasionally get it right.

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