At my house, we love to play games. My son, at 3 the youngest member of our family, will play games until he literally falls asleep sitting up. He has a few favorites: Granny’s House, Chutes and Ladders, Uno, Trouble and Sequence for Kids.
The last game in that list, Sequence, comes in several different versions. The standard adult version, which my wife and I have owned for years, involves two decks of playing cards and a board with those cards represented, minus the jacks which serve special functions. Each card you play from your hand allows you to place a marker on the corresponding board. The goal is to play five in a row before your opponent. It is made more complicated as you can block your opponent or use jacks to remove pieces from the board.
Brandon Hudson |
The children’s version is a simplified version of the same, with fewer character cards replacing the playing cards and a smaller board requiring only four in a row to win. It is a game that my 3-year-old can play, so long as I don’t mind helping him and looking at his cards that he has laid face up on the carpet. I don’t mind either of these things.
Last week, we were playing together when he began explaining his rationale behind certain play choices. “I’m not afraid of kangaroos,” he said as he played a card with a cartoon kangaroo emblazoned on it. I chuckled and played my turn. “I’m gonna play a fox; I’m not scared of foxes,” he said on his next turn.
On the one hand, both of those particular animals are worthy of fear, in my book. I have a bad habit of being bitten by things, and I know from Australiasploitation films that kangaroos are cantankerous and pack quite a wallop. On the other hand, I was deeply impressed that my son’s narrative explanation of his decision-making process so closely mirrored the decision-making process of many churches.
Fear has always been a powerful de-motivator and cultivator of stasis in the lives of individuals and communities. With the problematic splatter inherent to painting with a broad brush, it would be easy to read the grumblings of the Exodus, the fear to enter the Promised Land, the rejection of Jesus, the Great Schism, slavery, the Holocaust, gender oppression and inequality, and hatred of people with different sexual orientations as fear-based decisions and actions. Of course, that is not how any action is seen at the time. We are creatures who are able to justify our own hatred and fear under the guise of sensibility and the preservation of life as we know it.
Or let me put it a bit more bluntly. We are afraid of things other than what we know. We do not like to admit we are afraid. We justify our fear of that thing through dangerous leaps of logic, but in reality our fear, and therefore our actions, do not come from a logical place, but a deeper and more primal emotional space within us. Recent research has shown that we are actually creatures who feel before we think; it is almost as if the ability to justify our feelings is a biological impulse.
But there is a clear call for us as the people of God be smarter and more thoughtful than this. The Apostle Paul urges followers of Christ to “wake up” (Romans 13:11-14) and get over their former ways. While this “putting aside the deeds of darkness” often is spoken of in a moralistic way, what if we begin to read this as a statement in line with Jesus’ own dictum to let “those that have ears hear”? What if we begin to think that we are called not to some overly simplistic moral code, but to a new way of life — even a new way of thinking and feeling? I think we are called to this kind of deep awareness, an awareness that includes being intentional about how we make decisions, not only as individuals but also as groups.
I’m intentional about the use of the words “called to.” I do not believe that we can simply will ourselves into leaving behind our primordial urges to live out of fear. I do, however, believe that we’ve been shown a deeper and truer way to live our lives, but I wonder how often we are following that way.
Personally, I’m going to think about how I feel about kangaroos every time I make a decision or form a thought about a subject. Just like I believe my son will grow into a new way of playing that game, so too do I believe that I can grow into a new way of living. I’m not there yet, but by the grace of God, I believe I can learn to act out of love instead of fear, abundance instead of scarcity, and grace instead of judgment. But I’ll need others to watch me and make sure I’m not acting like a child. After all, that is why we are all in this together.
Brandon Hudson ([email protected]) is senior pastor of Northwest Baptist Church in Winston-Salem. He blogs at www.re-imago.com.