Chinese Checkers, Life Lessons?

Recently we have become reacquainted with the game chinese checkers. We went to the Chick-Fil-A Bowl this year and at night Brett, Me, Britney and Nate (Nate is a grad assistant with Brett and Britney is his wife and my dear friend) would be suckered into playing against our chaplain's wife, Stephanie Moore. Stephanie was sitting with me and Britney in the hospitality room and suggested in a lighthearted manner that we play chinese checkers like it was a chance for us all to skip together happily! The next thing we knew, she walked upstairs with a custom chinese checkers board with a special bag of marbles with the brightest smile I had ever seen on her! She had sharked us into it. One thing that Nate, Britney, Brett and I like to do is play games whether it is cards, cranium, or even charades.. we are all competitive and love spending time together without having to talk football or chat about where the next job lead could come from. So, for 3 nights straight, Stephanie suckered us into playing chinese checkers and we all basically lost every game as she wiped the floor with us for 2 hours! Let's just say the trash talk was out of control! One night, Stephanie's husband, Derrick joined us. He runs the FCA at Georgia Tech and he provides Chaplain support to many of the sports on campus. He brought up that night that he was going to actually play chinese checkers with the basketball team and turn it into a lesson for them to understand teamwork. In Chinese checkers the object is to get your whole group of marbles from one corner to the other. You can jump your own marbles as well as the other players marbles to achieve your goal. He asked us what we learned from the game and here are some of the life lessons we came across:

- You are only as strong as your weakest link, if all your marbles except one make it across, you can't finish with out the one left out.

- Always keep looking for your next move. Plan ahead, anticipate what your enemy will do.

- The enemy will be setting up roadblocks to keep you from achieving your goal.

- Sometimes you have to take one step in order to set up your big jump

- Patience, patience, patience!

Right now, waiting for God to set up the stage for our future is hard. I am learning each day how to live through this uncertainty. God is teaching me the right responses and the right moves to make in order to patiently make it through this time in our lives. This will not be the first time Brett will be looking for a job and I will need to know the right response to the season God has placed us in. Since this fall, I have gone from anxious, to obsessed with job openings, to angry with the lack of response from coaches with jobs to fill to a person I see as very talented and deserving of a full time coaching job. I have seen the lack of results in many of these attitudes. I have learned something from our discussion on "Chinese checkers: the game of life"; have quiet patience and live life the same everyday until God chooses to open the door and the path to the other side is clear. Our prayer as a family is that whatever God has planned for us, we pray that He makes it clear and He opens one door and we experience a peace about it. Keep us in your prayers. Pray that we have patience and that when the door opens, we "make the right move."