Tired of Winning

Tired of Winning--August 19, 2016

"Those who trust in their riches will wither, but the righteous will flourish like green leaves." [Proverbs 11:28]

I think I have won enough at Tic-Tac-Toe in my life.

By a certain point in life, you are just done with needing to win at that child's time-filler of a game, and you really don't have a "need" or a craving to play the game at all anymore, but certainly no more need to crown yourself World Tic-Tac-Toe Champion. 

So, when our family was out to eat the other day, and my son wanted to play the Tic-Tac-Toe game that was pre-printed on the kids' menu, I obliged him, not out of my need to vanquish another opponent in the game of Xs and Os but because he wanted to, and because I love my son. There was a time in my own childhood when I placed a great deal of worth and importance on who could win more games of this cerebral challenge, and I relished every time I bested, or even tied, my dad or grandfather or mom in restaurants or down time moments over the years.  But at some point I just realized that my value did not hang on how many times I won at Tic-Tac-Toe, and I guess you could say I just got tired of winning.

Deeper than that, I think I realized that "winning" was never really what was good about those childhood games of Tic-Tac-Toe. It was love.  It was time.  It was maybe even the brain-stretching exercise of learning whatever minimal strategy there is to the game.  But it was never really about winning--so maybe it's not even that I "got tired of winning," so much as at some point I realized that "winning" had been a silly and shallow thing to get excited about all along, and that it had never really been the thing bringing me any real joy.  And now as the dad in the restaurant waiting moments, I can see that whole exchange from a new angle. Even though as the adult I could trounce my five-year-old son every time, in a minimal number of moves and tell him the game was up before even half the spaces are filled in, that would miss the point of what is really happening there.  If I decided to best him every time, interspersed with relentless gloating about how I have won all the games, well, I would indeed rack up more wins in my lifetime win-column for Tic-Tac-Toe.  But that and five dollars will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.  The wins are meaningless by themselves.  Only when I see those games as means for building the relationship with my son, stretching his brain, and yeah, killing a little time until his chicken fingers arrive, does there come to be any lasting value in those games. And that value comes, regardless of whether I have won or lost or cat's-gamed the Tic-Tac-Toe game.  I'm just tired of winning, because it was never the thing that mattered.

The voices of the Scriptures have been saying the same thing for thousands of years. It's just that we have a harder time believing those voices when it comes to the grown-up equivalents of Tic-Tac-Toe wins--we have a harder time believing that "winning" at work... in our possessions... in other people's opinions of us... in anything, really, is as empty as the game on the back of the kids' menu. So the Bible has to keep saying it.  It's there in the Psalms and like today's verse, in the Proverbs.  It's there throughout the words of Jesus, and in the letters of Paul who came to recognize that all the so-called "wins" he had in his life were all "loss" compared to the surpassing greatness of being loved by Jesus. It's even the central message of the whole book of Ecclesiastes, in which the writer basically gives a list of all the "wins" he had racked up in his life, from money to romance and sex to intelligence to power, and then admits that they were all Tic-Tac-Toe victories: meaningless, like chasing after wind.  The writer of Ecclesiastes was tired of winning, too.

One of the hardest changes in our hearts to make is putting away that bit of persistent childishness.  Even though we may mature enough to know that placemat table games are kind of silly, we just move on to "grown-up" versions of the same silly obsession with trying to prove we are better than everybody else, or to puff ourselves up with the numbers in our "win" column. But grace, if we dare to let grace do its work, slowly erodes and wears away at the calcified thinking about "winning" that has built up in us over the years like plaque in an artery. And this the clever way grace does it: the whole logic of grace, the whole way of the gospel, is for God to love and accept us apart from our supposed wins or accomplishments, making them void of power to rank or define us. And God claimed us in the supreme act of loss--death by execution at the hands of the empire on a cross! And by discounting the worth of the "wins" we had racked up, God has also set us on equal footing in this new community, so that now I come to see everybody else around me as just as beloved, just as precious, just as blessed and treasured as I am. 

Grace is what helps us see that the point of the childhood placemat games were never about the wins, but about the love.  And grace is what lets us see that all the adult games of money-making, title-acquiring, romantic-conquesting, and pleasure-seeking were just as empty as the lifetime number of wins you had at Tic-Tac-Toe, Paper-Rock-Scissors, or the Dot Game.

It was always all about love. Now what will you do with your day--your life!--now that you don't have to waste it on the tedious and tired childishness of racking up "wins"?

Lord God, change our hearts to be free from the need to prove ourselves or one-up other people. And lead us out into the kind of love that doesn't need to impress.