When I was a little kid I used to pretend I was the owner of a baseball team. I would build charts by hand that laid out an ideal draft strategy for my team. I would make up player names, height, weight, stats, even the college they had attended (assuming that I hadn’t drafted them straight out of high school). This was important stuff to me and it helped me pass a lot of time – at school, at church, in the car.

I would often build my teams around a couple of players and then I’d draft and create seasonal stats for supporting players. I would always be sure to have a guy on the team who was a switch-hitter and could play both the infield and the outfield – a supersub. He could fill all the holes that would likely be created in my mind over the course of a 162 game season if there was an injury that popped up.

I would build my pitching staff in a similar fashion. Usually a lefty would assume the role of team ace and then three or four righties would give me 25-30 quality starts behind their inspirational future Hall-of-Famer. It goes without saying that I always had a monster coming in from the bullpen in the ninth to shut the door and lock down each victory.

My teams were good. In fact, I cannot think of a single season that I created on the back of a church bulletin in which my team didn’t at least get to the World Series. They usually won.

But something I always had to adjust were the total innings pitched by my staff. If you simply assumed that a team played 162 regular season games and none went into extra innings, then the total innings had to be 1,458. That is before taking into account the playoffs and the fact that approximately 8.5% of MLB games go into extra innings.

So, there I would sit, with a beautiful, hand-made graph and spreadsheet in front of me. I was always so pleased with my work. But when I started adding up the innings pitched, I could never make them jive.

And I could never fix the mathematical problems because the pen that I had borrowed from inside my dad’s suit jacket would not erase (my dad was either teaching me a life lesson or he just hated pencils).

And I remember feeling like I had wasted all this time making this team but was unable to make it realistic. I couldn’t erase the mistakes and make it right.

Now, as an adult, I sit in meetings and make baseball teams but I have the benefit of an iPhone calculator to double check my innings and averages and ERAs.

The pain that my dad put me through by not using pencils did teach me something. Just like on the back of a First Baptist Euless church bulletin, mistakes are made in life. Sometimes it feels like our mistakes, our miscalculations, missteps or wrong turns are irreversible. It is easy to think that every wrong thing we’ve done is in ink and that the wrongs can’t be made right.

But that thinking isn’t accurate. Redemption does exist. Second chances, even third and fourth chances, are out there. A lot of times we just have to step out and assume the risk and liability of trying again.

I want to encourage you to try again. Mistakes are inevitable in life. If you can’t quickly think up your top five or 10 mistakes from the past couple of years alone then you probably aren’t living.

Sometimes, getting a second chance is as easy as forgiving yourself. Other times you have to go and confess and ask forgiveness of those you’ve hurt, wounded or let down. Deep inside I think people want to forgive. People have a lot of stuff to carry around, phones, purses, e-readers, power cords, coffee – they’d probably love to not have to carry the anger they have for you around any longer.

In cleaning up my messes, I learned about Jesus and how he was all about second chances. He didn’t even really ask anything of me. He offers up free cracks at starting fresh all the time.

It took me a good number of years to grasp that. I wish I could have understood some of that a long time ago. On a related note, I wish I would have known that Ed Walsh once threw more than 460 innings all by himself for the White Sox in 1908. That kind of info would have really helped even out the innings as I labored on the 11th pew on the right at First Baptist Euless.