Every Tuesday for the last five years I have set in the same chair between 12:45 and 2:30 in the afternoon. It is a chair at the dining room table of Esther Luz. For three of those years I played Scrabble with George, and sometimes Everett Danley would join us. Those guys were serious scrabble players, and patient teachers of the game. The hours around a scrabble board taught me lessons I’ve already begun sharing. The most important was that you have to play the board, not your letters. It is easy to see a great six letter word on your rack – say COMBAT, and get only 12 or 14 points out of it – when the word COB played across a triple might gain 24 or 26 points.

In the same way, these older brothers taught me, we should look at our opportunities, not at the smallness of our gifts. Don’t look at your tiles first, look at the board – what opportunities has God given you there. Remember, one little boy’s lunch fed a crowd of 5000.

Another lesson learned around the Scrabble board from my Tuesday chair was how very silly my opinions usually are. I started to have a real affection for certain letters, and an absolute disdain for others. I hated (that’s the appropriate word) the consonants C and V, and wasn’t too happy with the vowel I. X, however, I loved. There are so many ways to score with X. Now letters are just symbols of sounds – they have no personality, no character. My feelings about them (like my feelings about almost everything) were based on solely selfish criteria. This is silly. This is sinful. Self-interest is no measure of true value.

Now that George is gone I play dominoes with Esther. A few months ago Thelma Perry joined our game. We play straight dominoes, in which you score only when you make a multiple of five. It is pure math, which is comforting because math is perfect, exact. Two and two always equal four. Each domino, thus, has a single number value. A 3/9 has a value of 6 – it can add or subtract six from the board. A 3/5 has a value of 2, and so on. If you play responsibly and don’t waste your dominoes the game is really about watching an equation unfold. There is a sense of unpredictability – you never know which dominoes you will draw, or which the other players will play. But there is a real sense of predictability as well, since each domino has only that one value, and the number of dominoes is fixed – it is a closed system.

Our Universe is like that – predictable, yet variable. We are finite, God is infinite. Actions have certain fixed consequences, yet we chose which course of action to take, and can never really predict which course others will take.

Also in dominoes you can only play the bones you draw. You may well know that a playing a double nine will score 50 points, but unless you have drawn a double nine this is useless information. So also are we responsible only for the gifts we have been given (Romans 12.3-8, I Corinthians 12.12-31). In dominoes you sometimes draw a hand where all your bones have a value of 2, and the spinner is a double 8 and you don’t have any 8s, and so you think “what a lousy hand” (if you play with us you are expected not just to think it, but to say it loudly and frequently). Then things fall your way and you score each play – you never know. “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to men of wisdom, but time and chance happen to all,” (Ecclesiastes 9.11).

I had an elder once, back in Ohio, who was known for object sermons – “How a Christian is Like a Pencil,” “How the Gospel is Like a Postage Stamp,” etc. I guess this has been a similar exercise. But just as Solomon looked to the ant (Proverbs 6.6), and David looked to the stars (Psalm 8.3-4), it is good to remember there are lessons to be learned about God everywhere – even in your Tuesday chair.