By the time most of you read this, I'll have been playing games for 48 hours. Well, not 48 hours straight - I do take time to sleep & eat - but on a gaming weekend like this, I'd guess that I spend 14+ hours each day sitting at the table rolling dice, drawing cards, and making bad decisions that lead to my eventual loss.
And I love it. I've been playing games since I was a little kid, thanks to a grandmother who loved cards (she taught me how to shuffle) and would get down on the floor to play whatever I asked... and to an aunt who bought me my first "bookshelf" game those many, many years ago.
In fact, thinking of my Grandma Jackson reminds me of a couple of important gaming/Jesus related thoughts... and I've decided to share them with you!
Pass It Down
Like I said, my Grandma Jackson is the one who taught me to riffle shuffle (and do "the bridge" - a skill which I still like to show off). She played Monopoly with my sister & I (and, according to my dad, with him & his friends when he was growing up). I think that much of my love of games started with her.
But it wasn't just games - she & my grandpa had a huge library of Reader's Digest Condensed Books... and I had permission to read them & borrow them. Because of her, I got exposed to a huge variety of novels & writers - something that has informed my eclectic (some would say "weird") reading tastes to this day.
The same is true of her faith in God - her faithfulness to Christ and her Christlikeness got passed down to my dad. And, because of the influence of my mom & dad, I became a follower of Christ at the age of 7.
Now, 40 years later, I'm passing down the love of games to my boys. And, thankfully, my faith... one of the highlights of my life is getting pray with Braeden as he asked Jesus into his life.
I am reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and, I am persuaded, now lives in you also... continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
2 Timothy 1:5, 3:14-15 (NIV)
Question: What are you passing down to your children & grandchildren?
Back in the Box
I've used the following story from John Ortberg about grandmas & games before... but that shouldn't stop me from mentioning it again... the lesson is important & profound.
My grandmother taught me how to play the game Monopoly. Now, my grandmother was a wonderful person. She raised six children. She was a widow by the time I knew her well. She lived in our house for many, many years. And she was a lovely woman, but she was the most ruthless Monopoly player I have ever known in my life. Imagine what would have happened if Donald Trump had married Leona Helmsley and they would have had a child. Then, you have some picture of what my grandmother was like when she played Monopoly. She understood that the name of the game is to acquire.
When we would play when I was a little kid and I got my money from the bank, I would always want to save it, hang on to it, because it was just so much fun to have money. She spent on everything she landed on. And then, when she bought it, she would mortgage it as much as she could and buy everything else she landed on. She would accumulate everything she could. And eventually, she became the master of the board.
And every time I landed, I would have to pay her money. And eventually, every time she would take my last dollar, I would quit in utter defeat. And then she would always say the same thing to me. She’d look at me and she’d say, “One day, you’ll learn to play the game.” I hated it when she said that to me. But one summer, I played Monopoly with a neighbor kid–a friend of mine–almost every day, all day long. We’d play Monopoly for hours.
And that summer, I learned to play the game. I came to understand the only way to win is to make a total commitment to acquisition. I came to understand that money and possessions, that’s the way that you keep score. And by the end of that summer, I was more ruthless than my grandmother. I was ready to bend the rules, if I had to, to win that game. And I sat down with her to play that fall.
Slowly, cunningly, I exposed my grandmother’s vulnerability. Relentlessly, inexorably, I drove her off the board. The game does strange things to you. I can still remember. It happened at Marvin Gardens. I looked at my grandmother. She taught me how to play the game. She was an old lady by now. She was a widow. She had raised my mom. She loved my mom. She loved me. I took everything she had. I destroyed her financially and psychologically. I watched her give her last dollar and quit in utter defeat. It was the greatest moment of my life.
And then she had one more thing to teach me. Then she said, “Now it all goes back in the box–all those houses and hotels, all the railroads and utility companies, all that property and all that wonderful money–now it all goes back in the box.” I didn’t want it to go back in the box. I wanted to leave the board out, bronze it maybe, as a memorial to my ability to play the game.
“No,” she said, “None of it was really yours. You got all heated up about it for a while, but it was around a long time before you sat down at the board, and it will be here after you’re gone. Players come and players go. But it all goes back in the box.”
And the game always ends. For every player, the game ends. Every day you pick up a newspaper, and you can turn to a page that describes people for whom this week the game ended. Skilled businessmen, an aging grandmother who was in a convalescent home with a brain tumor, teenage kids who think they have the whole world in front of them, and somebody drives through a stop sign. It all goes back in the box–houses and cars, titles and clothes, filled barns, bulging portfolios, even your body.
Question: are you living (and giving) in light of the fact that it all goes back in the box?
Trivial Pursuit
I'm actually pretty good at trivia games - of course, my dad loved to say things like "You can tell me who was King of England in 1590 but you can't remember to take out the trash 5 minutes after I tell you to!" (For the record, Dad was correct - I stunk at doing chores - and it was King James I.)
The same can be true of the Bible - having grown up in church, it's easy for me to tell Bible stories or quote certain verses. I've got all that information stored up in my brain.
But winning a game of Bible Trivia isn't following God - and that's where our 40 DAYS IN THE WORD campaign comes in. We want to go from:
- people stuffed full of Bible trivia OR
- people who are scared of how little they know of the Bible
to:
- people who love God's word
- people who learn God's word
- people who live God's word
Regardless of whether you'd smoke the table at Bible Scattegories or not, these next 7 weeks (starting February 5th) are tailor-made to help you not only take in God's word but also to live it out! Make plans to be here each Sunday morning & then join in a 6-week small group to practice what we're learning together!
