Slumps

Every hitter slumps.

Not every athlete in every sport faces what a baseball hitter faces in a slump: the extended period of public failure that appears in the stat line every game, that doesn’t resolve with one good performance but requires a sustained rebuilding of confidence over time. The slump is not a bad game. It’s a bad stretch of games, across a long season, with no guaranteed end date.

That is a specific kind of hard. And most sports never ask for it.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

In all things. The slump is in the all things. God’s capacity to work through the circumstances is not limited to the circumstances being favorable. The extended batting slump — the two weeks of zeros in the hit column, the at-bats that feel mechanically identical to the ones that produced hits but somehow don’t — is the kind of all thing Paul is describing.

The slump does something to identity that a single bad performance doesn’t. It creates enough time and enough consistent failure that the athlete begins to wonder whether the failure is permanent rather than temporary. Whether the hitter they were before the slump was the anomaly and this is the reality. That psychological drift is the actual danger of a slump — not the statistics, which will eventually correct, but the identity story that forms in the absence of performance evidence to counter it.

The discipline the slump requires is the ability to separate the temporary performance reality from the permanent identity reality. The hit column is empty. That does not mean the hitter is broken, or finished, or no longer who they were. It means hits are not arriving in this stretch. Hits have arrived before. They will arrive again. The work in the slump is to stay faithful to the process that produces hits without requiring the hits to confirm the faithfulness.

The distinction between temporary performance and permanent identity is the core diagnostic. Be patient with it.