Scrabble, Coffee, and Randomness [justin]

Primal instincts kick in when you’re walking into a situation where you would be considered the prey. I had to think quick. I swung open the door to the coffee shop with one hand and clenched the game board tightly with my other. The problem at hand was that my friends, wife included, had a twinge of English nerd in them and the game of the evening (Scrabble) wasn’t going to fall in my favor. The playing field needed to be leveled. So what was lacking in dictionary enlightenment was made up for in creative randomness that night. We called it Les Bbarc.

The rules were simple: create a word that wasn't real but still real-word-like and sell the definition to the other players. Usually, as long as you didn’t have a string of all consonants and the definition was either clever or funny, you were in. Words like deefor, slaist, and dinle appeared without much effort. Then some classics arose such as agoipe and dreslix; the former being when you slightly vomit in your mouth then swallow it, the latter having to do with accidentally putting on your wife’s jeans (accidentally mind you). It was entertaining to say the least. It felt good to be arbitrary. It felt good to play off the cuff.

It’s safe to say that a good portion of us are slackers. But it is also easy to see that many of us are overweight when it comes to our schedules. There is a saying that comes up time and again at church; “If the Devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy.” We equate busy-ness with worth and popularity. It’s a tool that enables us to hide our loneliness, even in a crowd, and even to ourselves.

I catch myself filling up my calendar for second-hand reasons at times. There is a hidden desire to do things, not to simply enjoy and experience them, but to boast and tell others what I did hoping they’ll catch the hint that I’m important and filled with life. That’s not to say that sharing experiences with others is not good and healthy, just that our prime motivator shouldn’t be trying to prove how hip we are to a jury of peers. In fact, one of the most beneficial things for our community of friends could be to use a random Friday night and partake in nothing, get some silence and solitude into our diet. While that might not gain you any points on the unspoken social totem pole (condemned to silence as Foster would say), it will probably help in appreciating the people around you for more than just a validation tool for your own agenda. “The one who wants fellowship without solitude,” Bonhoeffer comments, “plunges into the void of words and feelings.” Without some time away and quietness of spirit, our words tend to fall out of our mouths as empty chatter rather than thoughtful conversation complemented by meaningful silence. T.S. Elliot writes, “Where shall the world be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.”

Having some free time to allow life to happen to you isn’t the easiest thing though. A friend of mine, for instance, suddenly had a free night off after weeks full of small groups, photography class, reading groups, etc. He said that it was like a mule with a spinning wheel; no one knows how he got it, and danged if he knows how to use it.

Still, maybe it’s time to pull an oxymoron and schedule some randomness into our week. A day of rest is great, now how about an evening just to see what comes our way. We hold our lives so tightly as our own without regard to others and to the Divine. Perhaps a time of randomness will help us with our control issues. Or maybe nothing will happen. That could allow our insecurities to come to the surface where we can see and start to deal with them. No matter what, an evening unplanned will bring about something we weren't expecting, even if that something is doing the laundry.