In last week’s piece we visited Ecclesiastes 9.10-11, and that made me a little nostalgic, as I have been missing some very dear friends who taught me much about this passage. Not long after moving to Manassas 20 years ago I started having a weekly Scrabble game with George Luz and Everett Danley at George’s house. Every Tuesday we’d sit around George Luz’s dining room table, drinking tea, popping M&Ms, and looking for a place to get rid of that J before the game ended. It was a blessing to spend an afternoon with the two because both were wise, funny, and kind. They were the Misters Miyagi of the Scrabble board.
The big lesson they taught me about Scrabble is that you play the board, not your tiles. “Play the board, not your tiles,” they would both say when I would lay down six tiles for a measly 18 points. An inexperienced player tinkers with his rack of tiles trying to form the longest word he can. An experienced player watches the board, and takes every triple/triple, or double/double he can find. If you place an H (4 points) on a triple letter score so that it connects with an i and an e you make 26 points with that 1 tile. “Play the board, not your tiles,” George would say, and Everett would then apply the lesson: “That’s true about life, you know.”
The lesson is that you seize the opportunities God gives you without hesitation. If you consider the smallness of your gifts, or the smallness of the opportunity compared to the greatness of your gifts, you will accomplish little. “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might,” Ecclesiastes 9.10 says. Jesus did not consider the insufficiency of one boy’s lunch to feed a crowd of thousands, he just fed them. He didn’t consider our unworthiness in view of the greatness of his sacrifice – he just made it. Seize the opportunities God provides. Play the board, not your tiles.
George, then Everett passed, and I found myself at the same dining room table, on the same Tuesday afternoons playing dominoes with Esther Luz and Thelma Perry. We never quite taught Thelma the mathematical gist of dominoes. “You have to add 2 or take 3 away to make any points,” Esther would explain to Thelma, and invariably she would lay down a domino with a 2 on it. This, of course, is wrong. Only a 4/2, or a blank/2 domino has a value of 2. Thelma would then stare at her bones like she was intending to move them with her mind. At some point Esther, one of the few people with less patience than even I, would say, “Thelma, you can’t play a domino you didn’t draw.” She would apply this maxim to life as well. Any time I said “If only….” she would say “If only…If only…You can’t play a domino you didn’t draw.”
This is also true. You draw your dominoes blind. Maybe you pull a double 5, a double blank, and a blank/5. You have visions of turning your opponents 40 points into 45 for yourself – but it rarely works out that way. “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong….time and chance happen to all,” Ecclesiastes 9.11 says. Things rarely work out as expected. If we expect this unexpectedness we will avoid a lack of humility, or a lack of confidence - for the effort itself is the thing.
That is what these two truths, taken together, teach us. Seize the opportunity, and do not let the immediate outcome cause you to question any act of faithfulness for Time and Chance happen to all. That’s a lot to learn at a dining room table, I know – but it is there in the Bible, and it is true.
