Interactions with God #102

During a layoff, your job is to look for a job. For my industry, finding a job does not happen by driving around to companies and dropping off a resume. Even back in 2001, I did all of my job searching online. In a specific industry and job role like mine, a job search effort only takes about two to four hours each day. So, you end up with quite a bit of time to kill.

With all that time, I began to play a game on the computer called Spider Solitaire. You know the game. You can play it on phones now. It is a simple game of solitaire. It starts with ten card piles with only the top card showing. You then move cards around placing them on different card piles in decreasing number or suit. The goal is to line up the cards, from King down to Ace, in each suit. To win, you need to be able to move each completed deck off of the playing field. Whether you win or lose depends on how well you place the cards. However, depending on how the deck is dealt, it may not even be possible to win at all. During the game, you make several moves and can undo them if it looks like the move will hurt your chance of winning the game. But, you can only undo the mistakes a few moves back, and once you deal the next set of cards, there is no turning back at all. 

From the beginning of my playing the game during that first big layoff in 2001, I had a strange feeling that there was something in the game that God wanted me to see. By 2004, I had played the game a lot. After three years of playing this stupid game, I saw it. I finally saw what God wanted me to see.

In this life we make decisions and act based on what we know, understand, or see. We are worried about making mistakes, about failing. Some decisions work out well, some not so well. Some decisions we can fix. Some we can’t. Like the game, in each move, though it does affect the immediate direction we take, we don’t know if that direction will end up with a good or bad outcome. The outcome is in God’s hands. He is the one who controls how the cards land in the game as well as in life.

In the game, whether I won or lost, it really didn’t affect me at all. If I won, I had a mild, pleased feeling. If I lost, I just clicked the deck to start another game. I didn’t lose my breath or die over it. No, a loss in the game really didn’t matter at all.

In life, once we have given ourselves to Jesus Christ, the outcome, the end result, is assured. We are saved. So, success or failure in this life is not really relevant. Sure, we want to be prosperous, healthy and happy. But, these outcomes are not in our control. No, sorry, they are not.

“Dude, if you work hard you will succeed!” There is no guarantee of that! You can raise your kids the right way and they still may walk away from God. You can study your butt off and still not get a good job. You can eat right and still die of cancer. No, the outcomes are in God’s hands. Our choices of which way to go really don’t affect much. There is really only one choice that can affect us in life…and in the game of Spider Solitaire.

Whether or not we have fun with it.