The Providence of the Board: What Family Game Night Taught Me About Faith and Salvation

It is a strange fact of domestic life that the deepest truths tend to ambush us at the worst possible moments. They do not wait for the cathedral or the quiet hour or the carefully prepared retreat. They come instead while one is holding a plastic figurine in one hand and a fistful of dice in the other, at eleven o'clock on a Friday night, with a child arguing that the rulebook is wrong and a spouse quietly running out of ammunition.

We had pushed the supper dishes to one end of the table and spread out a game that involves a board, a crowd of little painted survivors, and an enormous number of shambling problems trying to eat them. The details do not matter much. What matters is the architecture of the thing: each of us controlled exactly one figure. Each figure had its own abilities, its own weaknesses, its own little card listing what it could and could not do. And all of us, together, were trying to survive the same night.

I had not expected a theology lesson. I had expected to lose.

The Tyranny of the Turn

The first thing one notices about such a game, if one is paying attention rather than merely competing, is a rule so obvious that nobody bothers to state it: you cannot take another person's turn.

This seems a trivial observation. It is, in fact, the most important rule in the box, and it happens to be the most important rule in the universe.

When my son's character stood cornered, with two actions remaining and three terrible options, I could advise. I could point. I could say, with all the restrained wisdom of a father who has read the rulebook twice, "I would move first and then attack." But I could not reach across the table and move his figure. The turn was his. The dice were his. The consequence, whatever it turned out to be, was his to carry.

There is something almost unbearable about this for a parent. We spend the better part of two decades trying to spare our children the cost of their own choices, and here was a game that reduced the whole impossibility to a rule printed on a card. I could not roll for him. I could only sit there and love him while he rolled.

And I thought, as the dice clattered: this is exactly what St. Paul was talking about, and I have been misreading him for years.

The Two Burdens

In his letter to the Galatians, Paul gives two instructions that sit within a few sentences of each other and appear, to the careless reader, to be in direct contradiction. He tells us to bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. Then he tells us that each of us must carry our own load.

Commentators have wrestled with this for centuries, usually by explaining the difference between the Greek words, which is real enough but rather misses the poetry of it. The board explained it to me in about four minutes.

There is a burden that can be shared: the crushing weight, the thing too heavy to lift alone, the crisis that arrives without warning. My daughter's character had no weapon; mine had two. I could drop one at her feet. My wife's figure was surrounded; my son's could draw the danger away. All night long we were handing each other supplies, opening doors that were not ours to open, spending our own precious actions to make someone else's turn survivable. This is bearing one another's burdens, and it is the whole business of family life. It is what a mother does at three in the morning and what a brother does on the playground and what a church does when a casserole appears on a doorstep after a funeral.

But there is also a load that cannot be shared, because it is not a weight at all. It is a self. It is the particular soul, with its particular gifts and its particular cowardice, that has been given to you and to no one else. Nobody can be brave on your behalf. Nobody can repent for you. Nobody can believe in your place. Your mother's faith, however luminous, will not be credited to your account; she had her own turn, and she took it, and it was beautiful, and it was hers.

Paul is not contradicting himself. He is describing a board on which we are all independent pieces, and on which we are all, nevertheless, on the same team.

The Heresy of the Solo Player

Now here is the part where the game turned uncomfortably personal.

Somewhere around the middle of the evening, I noticed what I was doing. My character had drifted toward the far corner of the board. He had the best equipment. He was efficient. He was, I would have told you at the time, "clearing the objective," and he was doing it magnificently, and he was doing it entirely alone.

Meanwhile, three-quarters of my family were pinned in a hallway.

This is the oldest temptation there is, and it wears a very respectable costume. I was not being selfish, you understand. I was being productive. I was contributing to the shared goal in the manner best suited to my abilities. I had simply calculated that the team's chances improved if I stopped spending my turns on other people's problems and started spending them on results.

The modern world has an entire vocabulary for this, and most of it sounds like virtue. We call it focus. We call it stewardship of our gifts. We call it knowing our strengths. And the terrible thing is that it is often half true, which is what makes it so much more dangerous than an outright lie. A man who abandons his family to run off and sin is at least aware that he has abandoned them. A man who abandons his family to achieve something noble may not notice for twenty years.

The game, being merciful in the way that only hard truths are merciful, made the arithmetic visible. Every turn I spent alone in my corner was a turn the hallway did not get. There was no separate scoreboard for my personal excellence. There was only one outcome, and it was ours.

I had forgotten that we were not four people playing four games at the same table. We were four people playing one game with four pairs of hands.

The Body That Sits Around a Table

Paul, who seems to have thought about this more than anyone, reached for the human body when he tried to explain it. The eye cannot say to the hand that it has no need of it. The foot cannot sulk off into a corner and declare that since it is not an ear, it will simply go be a foot somewhere else.

What strikes me now is how precisely the metaphor fits. Every character in that game had abilities the others did not. One was fast. One was strong. One could search a room and find what nobody else could find. None of them was good at everything, and this is the crucial point. That the game was designed so that no single one of them could win alone. The difficulty was calibrated to require all four. Not four identical players. Four different ones.

This is what the doctrine of the Body of Christ actually means, stripped of the stained-glass language that has let us ignore it for so long. It does not mean that we are all the same. It means the opposite. It means we are irreducibly distinct, permanently ourselves, each holding a set of abilities nobody else at the table possesses, and that the whole arrangement has been designed by Someone who fully intends for us to need each other.

A family is the first and smallest version of this. Long before it is anything else, a household is a collection of separate souls who have been placed on the same board and given the same objective and left to discover whether they will act like a body or like four people who happen to share an address.

What the Board Could Not Teach Me

I want to be careful here, because every metaphor eventually limps, and this one limps badly at the end.

A game can be won. We survived that night, incidentally, by the thinnest of margins and largely because my wife made a decision I thought was foolish and which turned out to be the only thing that saved us. But the great game is not won by the competence of the players. That is precisely the Christian claim, and it is the one point where the board breaks down entirely.

Because there was one more thing at that table that no one could do for anyone else, and it was not a burden or a turn or a roll of the dice. It was the acceptance of a rescue.

No one can take your turn. But the whole scandal of the Gospel is that Someone already has. On a hill outside Jerusalem, a man stepped onto a square that was not His and took a consequence that belonged to every other figure on the board. The load that could not be shared was shared anyway, by the only One with the authority to do it.

And still the acceptance of that gift remains stubbornly, maddeningly personal. God will not force your figure across the table. Grace is offered to the whole family and received one soul at a time.

The Dishes Still in the Sink

We packed the game away past midnight. The figures went back into their trays, indistinguishable from one another once the abilities were no longer attached to them, and I thought about how that was the one detail the designers got wrong. We do not stop being ourselves when the lid closes.

My children will each get their own turns, and there will be a great many of them, and I will not be able to roll for a single one. What I can do is what the game taught me: stay close, spend my actions on their survival rather than my own statistics, hand over the supplies I am hoarding, and refuse. Absolutely refuse, the respectable heresy of the far corner.

We are independent pieces on the same board, working toward the same end, unable to move one another and entirely able to help. That is not a limitation of family life. That is family life.

And the objective, thank God, was never to survive the night by ourselves.

~The Seeker's Quill