Wise Winning

Win­ning is every­thing, but you have to know how to play the game. Blindly fol­low­ing the pseudo-rules will cause you to lose. The game of life is won by tran­scend­ing the appar­ent codes. You have to get a bird’s eye (heav­enly) view of life to play it successfully.

There have been some real life win­ners in his­tory. In my book, Jesus is still the cham­pion and has the empty tomb to prove it. To get through the game and come out ahead, he had to vio­late all sorts of petty social rules (not the ideals of God). He knew the heart of God and lived it — which is what he asks his fol­low­ers to do. Petty rule-making and rule-enforcing is how the world con­trols its own.

The longer I live, the closer I look at how he lived. He was not an “ist” and did not cham­pion any “ism” nor did he imi­tate any­one else. He reflected on the great lives and writ­ers of the past, but he just lived his own unique life. His early child­hood poverty and the scan­dal around his birth did not become his excuse to live life like some sort of social vic­tim. He was a mem­ber of a despised minor­ity in a coun­try con­trolled by heavy-handed bureau­crats and heart­less law enforcers. In time he was rejected by just about every­one, but he never let that become his self-image or his phi­los­o­phy of life.

Sooner or later, life forces take all that you think you have (ashes to ashes and dust to dust). Before you look back at all you had and all you lost, change how you live now. Beat the neg­a­tive forces of his­tory to the punch by tak­ing an inde­struc­tible spir­i­tual route. If, like Jesus, you lose every­thing but his per­spec­tive — you will win. In the end, mate­r­ial life is a zero sum game any­way (which is why I hap­pily cel­e­brate so much of it in the imme­di­ate). Spir­i­tual life is an entirely dif­fer­ent way of win­ning. It plays the game from another angle — one that takes pos­i­tive imag­i­na­tion and a for­giv­ing smile.