Sim City Lives

Women received their dead raised to life again. Some men were tortured, not accepting release, so that they might gain a better resurrection, and others experienced mockings and scourgings, as well as bonds and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawed in two, they died by the sword, they wandered about in sheepskins, in goatskins, destitute, afflicted, and mistreated. The world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts, mountains, caves, and holes in the ground. All these were approved through their faith, but they did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, so that they would not be made perfect without us. - Hebrews 11:35-40 HCSB

There is an old version of the tremendously popular “Sim” series of video games that was called “Sim City”. The player could establish commercial, residential and industrial areas; lay down electrical and water lines, build churches and shopping malls. There was one feature of particular interest to me which was a landscape feature. You could use a bulldozer to flatten out mountains. You could use another icon to “tug” a flat plane up into a rugged mountain or to fill in a lake. For an obsessive perfectionist like me, you could not have a more wonderful capability.

My wife would simply accept the landscape the game randomly generated and work with it, using minimal modification. Her streets would meander up and down mountainsides with the houses perched precariously on the sides. She would have huge lakes in the middle of her city or forests intermixed with superhighways.

My cities would be rigid structures of crystalline perfection. All the streets were lined up in a perfect grid with every intersection absolutely perpendicular. My water lines lined up with the streets and woe betide any mountain or river that got in the way of one of my neighborhoods. One time, I worked for hours making an island continent perfectly square, with each square neighborhood exactly the same size and pattern as the next.

The problem was that in every case my wife beat me. She had less pollution, less crime and her citizens were way more happy than mine. Where she had populations in the hundreds of millions, mine were pathetic little villages with vast wastelands of empty buildings.

Life was not meant to be neat and tidy. We were not designed to always get our way. Chaos happens. People do not always respond correctly to the truth. They are stubborn, willful, sinful and oh so beautiful. Isn’t the old saying “variety is the spice of life”?

None of the people in today’s passage enjoyed their trials yet they rejoiced in them.[1] Because they worked through their circumstances instead of running away, they came out better, stronger and more beautiful.

So don’t worry that your life is not perfectly rectangular. Got a mountain in your way? Build some condos on it and plant a big “Hollywood” sign on it.

[1] James 1:2-3