MASH Lied to Me About My Future

I love games. I think my crush on them started when going on a long bus ride to somewhere educational in the 4th grade. I was sitting next to my BFF Jordan on the bus and across the aisle were two girls who had a binder and a piece of paper out. They were giggling and writing and laughing and pointing and smelling good, standard girl stuff. Being the manly 4th grader I was I leaned over to whisper into Jordan's ear, "Hey man, ask them what they are doing."

Turns out they were playing a magical game called "MASH." Now if you aren't familiar with the game Mash then I can say two things about you, 1. You weren't a 90's kid, and 2. You didn't plan your life around arbitrary counting and random outcomes. But none-the-less, this is when I realized that games make everything more bearable, even if I did end up marrying Mrs. Van Horn, living in a shack, driving a Gremlin, while having 13 kids and being a professional basketball player.

But games can't just be rushed into and done at the drop of a hat. A game has to have a thought behind it, planning, rules, time frames. They have to have an element of risk, excitement, fear, competition, and challenge. If a game is run poorly then no one will want to play next time, trust me, I know. I have done multiple games that in my head sound like a great idea and they have fallen flat on their face because we either played them too long, too often, or they were too easy (or too hard).

But think about what you do when you get together with friends, unless you are only having a boring dinner party with appetizers and cloth napkins, they usually revolve around a game. Whether it be Pictionary or the Superbowl, we love games, they make us laugh, they loosen us up, they give us the opportunity to be our crazy competitive selves and it's okay.

I recently shot flour out of a potato gun at Jr. Highers and High Schoolers for getting an answer wrong, and you know what, they loved every single minute of it. Games are a way that we can worship God through community, they are a way to introduce others into our community, I mean is there a better way to say Jesus loves you by shooting 100 pounds per square inch of flour at someones face? I dare you to find a better way.