card game

We’re dealt the cards and we play the game. I’ve got my deck, I hold it up, fan it out and climb inside. This is me and the game will be won or lost with me on board. I am the price that is paid.

I am holding: a male, a mediocre upbringing, a good IQ, a couple of traumas, good genes, poor education, low self-esteem…it could be a winning hand, but it’s doubtful, depends what everyone else has got.

We eye each other across the table. It’s a long game; goes on about 70 years and will make losers of us all in the end. We play for a ‘life’ - before death comes and stakes his claim – a ‘life’, which is measured by the value of our different hands. What we all want are the winning cards, ones which are so good, they make us feel good. But when we win we still feel like losers, so we change the rules and play on.

All I wanted was to go home and yet somehow, like the others, I was tricked into this stupid game. I’m betting my life on cards which aren’t worth it, I’m bluffing and cheating in order to even the odds and I know that all I can do is lose because winning isn’t enough. The cards I’m holding aren’t good enough to win the life I want, so I ask myself, why am I even bothering to play?

These cards aren’t me, how can they be, I never wanted them nor asked for them. If I had my way I would never have dealt myself these cards. I would have had a tall, a handsome, an amazing musician, a rich, an intelligent. I would make sure I never got any pain handed me. And yet I see death, abuse, terrible suffering and heartache –to name but a few – being dealt out. They’re ugly and useless cards and, even worse, lives being staked on them. Pain and suffering are laid down with a flourish, the player- in their need to win - having defaced the cards, written bravado and carefree across them. I hate this game.

I watch the cycle of winning and losing, losing and winning and gradually, over years, the truth dawns on me; there are no winners, it only feels so because we’re mesmerised by the value of the stakes, but the stakes are the only things that matter. I reach forward and pick myself up off the table. “You can’t do that” say the others “that’s breaking the rules.”

“It’s only breaking the rules, if I’m playing the game” I reply. And with that I push my chair back, get up, and walk away. As I pass a bin on the way out I throw my cards into it. They are nothing to do with me.

I imagine you might think that this story has nothing to do with church but it is to do with life and they are, or should be, indelibly connected