I have a confession to make. I like to play cards. Not really. Iʼm not a card shark or anything like that. I donʼt know the first thing about playing bridge or poker. But I like to play solitaire. It's simple, quick, and efficient. I can sit down at the kitchen table and play two or three games in a matter of ten minutes, and I find it very relaxing.
I often stop in the midst of my work at the computer or reading a book and pick up a well-worn deck of cards and start laying them out on the table. The thing I really like about solitaire is watching how the cards run. If you play often enough, you begin to see patterns in the way they turn up.
For a while, they seem to play themselves, they turn up so well. You win one game, two, three, four, even five or six. Then they start turning up poorly, so that the game becomes turgid and doesn't seem to work at all. That goes on for one game, two, three, and so on. Finally the luck turns and goes the other way again. Every time I play, I see this, and I think, “This is the way life itself is.
Sometimes your fortune runs high, and then it begins to run low. But when it runs low, it is going to run high again.” In ancient and medieval times, they used to talk about the wheel of fortune, and how it is always turning, bringing good luck, then bad luck, then good luck again. I find this very encouraging.
It means that we shouldn't ever despair when things are going badly, because they will go better very soon. And we shouldn't ever boast or brag about how well they're going, because they'll soon begin going the other way.
Where does God figure in all of this? I think sometimes God intervenes and makes things change for us when they've been going badly for a while, and that our praying for God to do this will help it to happen. Or maybe our expecting God to make them change is enough to cause it to happen.
It's all too deep for me to figure out. But I do like to play solitaire because it reminds me that life isn't as casual and haphazard as we sometimes think it is.