Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

He will not escape the darkness; a flame will wither his shoots, and the breath of God’s mouth will carry him away.

• Job 15:30

“Bear with me a little longer and I will show you that there is more to be said in God’s behalf.

• Job 36:2

Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”

• Mark 3:35

But as he left, he promised, “I will come back if it is God’s will.” Then he set sail from Ephesus.

• Acts 18:21

in my prayers at all times; and I pray that now at last by God’s will the way may be opened for me to come to you.

• Romans 1:10

As for the Scriptures, I like the two from Job as companion verses.  We might have destruction coming our way, but wait, there is more to God than we might have thought about.  We are Jesus’ brothers and sisters if we follow God’s will.  And in both cases, Paul prayed for it to be God’s will to go somewhere.  He did return to Ephesus where he preached for over two years, and he eventually made his way to Rome.  But Paul did not simply decide to do these things, he went to God in prayer.

I play solitaire on my phone as a relaxation method.  I find that if I am writing and researching all the time, my mind shuts down.  I need those breaks.  God tells us to rest on the Sabbath, and while my rest is scattered, resting from writing more on Sundays, I find solitaire a means of having a puzzle to solve that does not send my mind wandering.

Okay, in this case, it sent my mind wandering in the right direction.

I was playing Spider solitaire.  I had everything set up to complete a suit from Ace to King, except for one card.  All that has to happen is for me to click the draw button and get the right card in the right place and I have the game won.  Then I hit that button and I get garbage on top of all my nice little sorting work I had done.  Sometimes, absolutely no card plays and then the next draw from the draw pile makes everything even worse.

Since I downloaded the application to my phone, I have a 58% winning percentage with two-suit spider.  But what is horrible in that statistic is that the application only provides winnable shuffles of the cards.  That means if I ever lose, and roughly 40% of the time I lose, as of this writing, it means I made a mistake. It is not the impersonal shuffle of the cards that did me in, I either moved the wrong card or I placed the card in the wrong spot or some other flub.  Sometimes doing nothing is the right move.

And that was my revelation the other day while having a really bad losing stretch.  Otherwise, I might have a winning percentage close to 70%.

When we rely on our own strength…  When we divert our eyes from our gaze on Jesus…  Or when we have self-determined we need to take a course of action, but we did not consult God to see if it is His Will…  We hit the draw button of life and often find nothing but unplayable garbage.

But understand, when we are within God’s will, we are dealt winnable hands every time.  Something not working out is not God’s fault.  We might pray “God, why did You not pick up the broken pieces and fix them?”  But let’s be honest, God dealt us a winning hand and we broke those pieces by not keeping our gaze on Jesus and trusting Him and His plan.

I have had garbage hands many times.  And I have had those hands where I hardly had to think about the next move.

It all depends on whether we trust God or we trust our own abilities.  Let’s not even mention trusting other people, unless we know that they trust God as much as we do.

I don’t know.  This analogy will confuse those that do not play Spider solitaire, but it just hit me as something that might resonate with a few.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.