New to the little league scene, we signed up our son in the eleventh hour and somehow got placed on a team of families who all happened to live in an expensive, gated community six miles up the road.

I found myself spending hours every week sitting on the bleachers with these baseball moms. (Those of you with baseball kids know what I mean about notoriously long practices and even longer games.) Their conversations ranged from the carat sizes of their diamonds and the number of times their housecleaners came over each week, to cosmetic surgery and updating their kitchens. It was not unusual for one of the moms to comment on the shirt of the woman sitting next to her, and then pull out the tag to see the name of the designer. All these topics were shared from behind sunglasses long after the sun dipped behind the hills surrounding the baseball field.

The more time I spent with these women, the more I found myself preoccupied with the size of my own diamond and what tags lined my shirts. As a result, here’s one life lesson I learned from hours by the baseball field:

We become like the people with whom we spend our time.

Like Jesus, Paul modeled an important truth of the Christian life: God calls us to walk with Him in the company of like-minded believers. Paul makes this clear as he writes to the church at Philippi about Timothy and Epaphroditus, two friends who’d become more like family. These men linked arms with Paul as fellow workers and fellow soldiers intent on sharing the gospel (Philippians 2:25).

We are not designed to live out our faith in isolation.

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