PIT

Pit Deluxe with Bell!BUY NOW
PIT TRADEMARKREGISTERED IN U.S. PATENT OFFICERules for PARKER BROTHERS TRADING CARD GAMECOPYRIGHT 1919 &1947 BY PARKER BROTHERS, INC.The greatest of all party games

PIT. I played the game PIT last night for the first time in years with some good friends and their kids. I was sitting around a crowded table and found myself suffering from an intense case of tunnel vision. That little bell in the middle of the table got blinged, and my whole world became the pursuit of all nine wheat cards. I was yelling and stretching across the table and grabbing and reshuffling the cards . . . all the while oblivious to my 16-month-old dangerously perched on her booster seat or my 3-year-old whining unhappily because he couldn't hear his cartoon above the raucous. Then, out of nowhere, just when I almost had collected all matching commodities, the bell rang. The game abruptly ended. And reality came back into perspective . . . I settled the toddler safely on the ground and turned up the volume for the unhappy boy and realized that there was indeed still life outside of PIT.

Perspective. I have been thinking a lot about perspective and focus lately. I read just two days ago the following lines:

"So we fix our gaze not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal." - 2 Cor. 4:18

Heaven. Eternity. Things that last--people, love, Truth, relationships, faith, God, His Words. What is right before me, what I see so easily with my physical eyes will pass away in the bigger picture of time, but the intangible, the unseen, those are the lasting, the more important, the things I should be "fixing my gaze" upon.

Life in THE PIT. The struggle, however, is that my life is like the PIT game. The bell rings and my day begins. It's running from mess to argument to attitudes to event to project and then to bed. Only to have the bell ring again to usher in a new day of numbly walking through the motions, of focusing on the cards right in front of me. And the trouble is that when I focus on the cards and become frantically consumed with the "game" of life, I miss the more important things going on around me. The more lasting, the eternal, the unseen--my relationship with Jesus, my interaction with Truth, my chances to love people. Life in the PIT means I am more focused on getting the carpet vacuumed efficiently than I am about my daughter learning the value of work. Life in the PIT means I stick to the routine blindly without pausing to ask the Spirit if I should go a different direction with my kids this day. Life in the PIT means I'm not attentive to what may be going on around me, means I am concerned more about money than relationships, means I worry instead of practice faith, means I place more value on a clean house than on time with my husband.

The Bell Rings. And just like the bell rings to start the game, the reality is that the final bell will ring, too, to end it. And immediately, whether I am an old wrinkly lady or whether its tomorrow in a car accident, the game will be over for me. And I so hope that when that day comes, I will have paid more attention to the Life transpiring around me and the God I got to love, than to the acquisition of all the right cards amid the chaos of everyone else playing their own games.

. . . But, don't misunderstand me, despite my ramblings, PIT truly is still one of the best party games ever invented.

Thanks for taking the time to read.