Devotion 347 - wager

I have come to the point in life where I enjoy reflection.

I enjoy thinking about success and I can honestly admit I can pray about failure.  Although I have enjoyed success much… failure no longer scares me.  I believe this truth comes with age.

I think about what I have taught my children.  There are the biggees.  We have taught them something about the gospel, hopefully we have taught them some a semblance of manners and I have taught them how to play Uno.

I am good at Uno.  So good in fact my husband will no longer play with me.  My children still humor me.

I came to this realization two years ago.  My oldest son was touring the Holy Land.  My husband would receive beautiful emails.  Bailey would write things about the Temple Mount and wading in the Dead Sea.  I would get more one-liners.  “I am up 32 to 27 in the Uno tournament,” somehow I was equally proud reading both emails.

You see somewhere along the line I figured out the secret of Uno, it is all about keeping the best cards in your hand until the very end.  I keep my draw 4 and draw 2 close to my vest, and more often than not, I win.  Smarter, perhaps kinder parents would let their children win sometimes.  Not me. 

Bailey phoned me last week.  He had three papers due and a test all on the same day.  I asked what he was writing about knowing full well most of the subject matter would appear grey and over my head.  But he mentioned one work for his philosophy class I knew well.

I didn’t admit it then but I will now, I somehow came through seventeen years of school without taking any subject that ended with a “ogy” or “ophy”.  I had no use for frog parts so I bypassed biology for chemistry and physics.  In college, my focus was language and business; therefore I bypassed the studies of philosophy, psychology and sociology.

At some point, I bumped in to psychology in a marketing class.  I quickly embraced the fact that I did not like it; it seemed manipulative in the realm of marketing.  Further, at home I was coming to grips with the fact that my mother’s mind was not completely well, and therefore I ran quickly from Psychology fearing I would learn something I did not want to know.

Bailey however was to analyze a work of Blaise Pascal’s Pensees.  I had read this work in French and was forever changed by it as well as the author.  In the Pensees, Pascal challenges his reader to wager on God offering that if one bets one’s life, he might gain another life, an eternal one.  If one loses, he loses nothing.

By the wonder of technology, Bailey could post his paper and write while I read his words.  We commented back and forth into the wee hours of the morning.  I could not comment on what this work meant to mankind, only what it meant to my soul.  In one of Pascal’s other works, he wrote, “the heart has reasons that reason does not know.”

 

I have reflected and re-quoted that line hundreds of times.  And that is really the bet the author was making when he wrote of the wager.  He knew if one wagered to wager, the Holy Spirit, the card the Father kept close to His vest would draw.  What He presents as a two for one equation as Pascal was also a mathematician, was really not one for two but one for everything, eternity.

As Bailey and I typed and wrote, I reflected on the fact that life in many ways is a series of wagers, a series of risks, and a long line of hope. Whether children are delivered in a birthing room or a courtroom, we wager on the love we cast for the love that will return. We wager on marriage.  

We trust that casting our capstone with another gives us something strong on which to build. We trust that unified capstone will stand through storms and sorrow.  We trust that it will bear the weight of the children that will rest upon it. 

And we learn a great deal more about wagering on God.  Somewhere, close to our vest, He places not a card but a series of words that the Holy Spirit engraves on the darkest places. 

Perhaps we hope with that very first wager that happiness will follow.  But happiness does not require God to show himself.

We grieve and He reminds us that He carries our sorrow.

We suffer and He reminds us He is acquainted with pain.

We carry unspeakable burdens and He offers to carry them.

We lose and fail and feel inadequate and He reminds us He is victorious and much more than enough. The life focused on the end is the only life worth living.

We see with new eyes if we blind ourselves to our circumstance and open them to our Creator. The cries for happiness deafen to the call of contentment.  I may not like now, but I am assured I will love tomorrow.  

It is the crazy love of Christ that keeps the very best for last.  Not because He is a capricious God but one that allows for nurturing and growing before glory comes.  

How many of us would know sweet if we had never tasted bitterness, and how many joy, if we had never known heartache.

He readies us Beloved.  He draws us.  Beyond reason, our spirit is called by His own to follow, to trust, to believe and to surrender.  

And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God.   Ezekiel 11:19