Seven Tennis Balls

I almost was an hour late coming home from school today, all because of a tennis ball.

The campus I attend has tennis courts near the light rail station. One of the features of one of the courts is a solid wall against which one can bounce their tennis balls to practice their control. However, in the case that their control could use more practice, there is a tall chain-link fence around the wall's area and the other tennis courts. So, if you try to hit the wall, but miss, perhaps by overshooting the wall, the ball will hit the fence instead. And, given the size of the average tennis ball and the size of the gap between the linked chains of the chain-link fence, it's possible for a ball to be hit hard enough to get stuck in the fence.

Apparently, that happened to one or more unlucky souls a total of at least eight times, because as I was walking to the light rail station, I noticed that there were eight tennis balls stuck in the chain-link fence above the wall in the tennis courts. Because of how the regional transit system's timing doesn't quite match up with mine, I arrived at the light rail station half an hour before I had to catch a train, which gave me plenty of time to try to get those tennis balls. I wanted those tennis balls because they're fun to bounce and roll around, and besides, I mostly just wanted to succeed at the challenge of retrieving them.

And retrieving them proved to be a rather strenuous challenge. Naturally, they were too high up to reach. I tried climbing the fence to reach them, but to no avail. My hands didn't like trying to climb the fence, and my feet couldn't get enough traction to help. I needed a tool. Some kind of stick, perhaps. Fortunately, there are many trees on my campus, some of which occasionally drop sticks of a considerable size. I walked from one side of campus to the other, grabbed several sticks I thought might be long enough and/or thick enough to be useful, and walked back, though I ultimately only needed one. It was a long stick with a thick end and a skinny end. The thick end had an almost hook-like shape to it, which let me hook onto a tennis ball and kinda roll it out of the fence. One tennis ball down, seven to go.

The others couldn't be rolled out, but I did manage to knock several of them out by hitting them with the thick end of the stick. Unfortunately, one tennis ball was too high up to hit with the stick. I walked around to the other side of the fence, where the elevation was slightly higher, and tried to hook the tennis ball and roll it out. I worked on that tennis ball longer than any of the others, probably about ten minutes. Eventually, I realized that I either had to give up on that tennis ball or risk missing my train. Had I missed that train, I would have also missed my connecting bus, and the next one wouldn't come by for another hour. I decided that that final tennis ball wasn't worth getting home an hour late, so I stashed the stick behind the wall, gathered up the seven tennis balls I had already hooked and knocked down, and just barely caught my train, still sweating from the exertion of trying to get that last tennis ball, which, to my knowledge, is still in that fence right now. If it's still there tomorrow afternoon, I might go get it then.

Still, as I boarded the train, I was very aware of how my pockets were practically bursting with seven tennis balls. One would have been a fun toy. Two tennis balls could race each other down slopes. Three were enough to juggle. But I hardly knew what to do with seven whole tennis balls. It seemed almost foolish to spend so much time trying to retrieve an eighth.

We all have a lot of blessings. We are alive. We have bodies. We have families. We all have places where we can live, at least temporarily, including wherever we happen to be at the moment. And we all occasionally find some food to eat. Most importantly, we all have a Heavenly Father who loves us, a Savior who redeems us, and a Comforter who guides us. Even without accounting for an abundance of material possessions, we are all richly blessed.

Yet, we sometimes still think about that eighth tennis ball, just out of reach, and we sometimes devote too much time and too much effort into trying to get it. Had I been satisfied with the other seven tennis balls, or even just one, I could have spent the rest of that time throwing the tennis ball against the wall and generally having a lot of fun. Similarly, if we spent more time counting our blessings and less time pining after the blessings that we haven't yet received, we might all be a lot happier. As it stands, I have more tennis balls than I know what to do with and more blessings than I can count. Perhaps I'll leave the eight tennis ball for someone else to retrieve and be more than satisfied with the seven tennis balls I have now.