Oh the games people play now!

 

One of the things that I have enjoyed over the past year of lockdowns, is the game of Scrabble.  During the first lockdown in March 2020, I played regular games over Skype as a way of spending time with a friend without the constant need to talk.  It worked very well.  It has become our habit to play collaborative Scrabble in which we aim to work within the rules but to utilise every tile, and to preference the flow of the game above individual scores.  This is so much more satisfying that a competitive game with a winner and a loser.

 

The restrictions we have endured over the last year have meant that many of us feel like losers.  We have all lost something, and some have lost a great deal.  There is impatience and anger simmering which spill over into behaviour and separate us from each other.  When a careless driver knocks our wing mirror, or we are treated badly at the checkout, when our words are misinterpreted, or we are overlooked and unheard, we feel wronged and resentful.  We feel the other person has won and we are the loser unless we take action ourselves.  How can we heal this divisiveness? How can we bring light for ourselves and others?

 

Jesus’ injunction to ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ is probably his best known and most quoted.  But possibly also the least understood.  The word ‘yourself’ is key here and it implies that if you don’t love yourself, you won’t be able to love others.  We are all an extension of each other, so if you cannot love yourself, how could you love someone else and why should you expect someone else to love you?

 

Faced with human misery, Jesus always had compassion.  As we enter the season of Lent, compassion is a good quality to contemplate.  It literally means ‘to suffer together’.  When we see suffering, we are moved to our guts and want to help.  However, very often suffering manifests itself in outwardly repellent behaviour:  anger, impatience, unkindness, jealousy.  When we recognise this behaviour as suffering, perhaps we can be moved to kindness instead of retaliation.  It helps if we can recognise compassion that is directed towards us.  Have you ever experienced deep compassion from someone?  Might this be God’s compassion working through them?  Of course, if we don’t recognise our own needs then we will be unable to receive compassion!

 

One thing the virus has shown us is that we are all totally interdependent.  In the game of life, there should not be winners and losers.  It is possible for us all to be winners if we recognise that whatever labels society gives us, we are all just each others’ neighbours.