There’s a Lutheran pastor in Reno, Nev., who loves to play golf, and has since he was a kid in Staten, Island, N.Y. In fact, he and his brother used to sneak onto the local muni and get in a few twilight holes. It was their own personal mini-getaway.

A couple decades later, after he’d been ordained, Pastor Carl got his call to the remote northwest corner of North Dakota. That’s where he also met his wife, Dianne. Once their two daughters had come along, Carl found himself with little time for golf. He was pastoring to several small churches, putting a lot of prairie miles on his car and enjoying the (truly) joyous duties of father- and husband-hood. The golf clubs got short shrift.

Sound familiar? How many young dads have suddenly found themselves a year or two down the road of life without taking a swing? That’s just the way it is; God has other plans, fate intervenes, free will wins out, whatever.

But according to one of his favorite sermons, Carl still found a way to carve out a round now and then — or so he thought.

“I’d do some chores around the house, or take care of the girls, and all the while I told myself I was racking up ‘golf points,’” he said. “I was keeping score.”

Not only did this little exercise prove unnecessary — Dianne was onto him and let him know that she knew he was going to feed his golf addiction anyway, and no amount of ‘extra’ work would add to the tally on his side — it flew in the face of his church’s chief theological tenet: that he, and all believers, are loved no matter what.

It does no good to keep score. Working the angles doesn’t change a thing. You’re already there.

That’s a tough pill for golfers to swallow. Christian or Jew, Muslim or Buddhist, atheist or agnostic, we relate to the game chiefly by what we write down on that scorecard. It’s part of our identity, how we view ourselves as golfers and, all too often, as human beings.

I know that for a fact because I’m the king of stinging self-talk. After carding a double or worse — even if I’m walking down a gloriously rumpled fairway at Bandon Dunes, soaking up the intense but lovely Puerto Rico sun or otherwise pinching myself at the good fortune of actually standing on a tee box in Hawaii or Arizona or Vancouver Island, or a hundred other dream locales — I’ll give myself an internal tongue-lashing that would make the world’s worst masochist wince.

And where’s the fun in that?

Exactly. As Paul Simon once sang, “When numbers get serious/They leave a mark on your door.” Usually in blood.

Actually, I’m much improved since my feared “Ivan the Terrible” days, when a well-north-of-par performance on one lousy hole would ruin me for the rest of the round, all because of a number written on a piece of paper. I’ve much improved my personal “bounce-back” stats, if I do say so myself. But still I struggle with that sense of score-induced self-strangulation, and I’m not alone.

Golf is hard, and we’re harder on ourselves. We know we’re capable of scoring better. But in the end, what does it matter, unless our livelihood depends on it? Why not just take a step back, wrest our self-esteem from the demon numbers’ grip and just enjoy the day?

Easier said than done, but it’s worth a try.

Chucking the card altogether is certainly an option, though, as a stubborn and competitive knucklehead, I prefer to have some kind of action on the line, whether it’s just me against me, me against the course or me against a fellow par-seeking pilgrim. And I’ve learned to go that route on occasion. The numbers are always there, loitering at the top of my shaky backswing or crouching in a bunker, but I do my best not to let them dictate who I am.

That said, there are plenty of ways to keep it fun while keeping score on some level — and, all the while, keeping your personal demons at bay.

Let’s head back to the aforementioned Bandon Dunes for apt illustration, shall we?

Earlier this year I joined three fellow journalists at that Oregon coast outpost for a week of “Essential Destination” research — rounds at three of Bandon’s four stellar layouts, plus visits to nearby Bandon Crossings, Old Bandon Golf Links and the hallowed off-the-official-map Bally Bandon Sheep Ranch, along with interviews with resort honchos, several memorable meals and copious storytelling and laughter. And running through it all was a thread of friendly competition born of creativity and a healthy appreciation of where we were — which, in golf terms, is pure paradise. We teamed up for scotch foursomes (otherwise known as alternate shot), Nassaus, skins and two-man better ball or whatever other attitude-adjusting format we could think of. At the Sheep Ranch, where a dozen greens and a slew of alternate fairways engender anything but boring ol’ medal play, we kept only a skeleton of a score for the first few free-form holes, finally abandoning the pencil altogether as we just tried to make shots in the muscular sea breeze, wielding everything from state-of-the-art drivers to century-old hickory sticks.

In fact, over our five days at Bandon, we only truly went the solo-scoring route for our opening “practice round” at Crossings and the second-to-last-day circuit at Pacific Dunes, my personal favorite and the scene of many a scintillating par and memorable meltdowns over the half-dozen times I’ve teed it up there.

This time — irony alert — I let myself score well at Pacific, in the low 80s. I believe it was due to the fact that, by that point in the week’s long and luxurious arc, I had trained myself to not care about where the numbers landed. I relaxed and reveled in the day, in the magic of place that this crazy game so successfully conjures time and time again, instead of tensing up and letting the digits take over.

It’s a philosophy that my cohort Darin Bunch and I have employed for years, usually via what we call “FG Skins” — a quarter a hole over how many rounds we’re playing together that week, no matter where we are in our travels. Double skins for birdies, carryovers for greenies and sandies — anything to keep us away from the shadow-world of numerical self-loathing, at least for the long term; we’re human and we do suffer short-term relapses. Golf is nothing if not sweet frustration, but the trick is candy-coating it in gratitude for simply Being There, away from the desk, the drudgery, all the bad news in life.

So, in the end, as we count up the skins (usually finishing within a buck or two of each other), we realize we’ve successfully kept the game’s competitive side alive — without the numbers themselves eating us alive.

As for Pastor Carl? He still plays a lot of golf. And I’ve played a lot of rounds with him, at home and on the road. We do keep score, even though we know that, in the grand scheme of the universe, it matters not.

We’re just blessed to be golfers.