Posts Tagged: to-do lists

“Instant Gratification and Speed Chess”

On November 2, 2022 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

As I think I have confessed in these musings before, I am very prone to immediate gratification. In fact, I’m into keeping on with the not-so-gratifying gratification until it is no longer gratifying at all. Online chess is—like the internet itself—highly addictive. Ten-minute games are my current drug of choice.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with chess. Well, there isn’t anything wrong for many folks. It can be fun and can expand your mind. However, I can turn everything into an addiction.

One of the problems with the desire gratification, via chess or anything else, is that it ignores reality: both material and spiritual realities. You doubt? For the material aspect, try this on for size.

“Prepare your work outside;

get everything ready for yourself in the field,

and after that build your house.” (Proverbs 14:27, English Standard Version)

I grew up on a farm. My dad kept talking about building a new and better house. He never got out of the field long enough to do that, so we lived in a—how can I say this delicately—a house that was more than a little old. (Of course, in many parts of the world, our house would have been a mansion.) My dad wasn’t terribly religious, but he was living in tune with Proverbs 14:27 for sure!

And perhaps, he was wiser than I gave him credit for. We always had what we needed. He had seen farmers who, after a couple of good harvests with decent prices, started building nice, modern houses. Some of them never got to live in their new houses because they had to stop building them, due to a lack of enough money to finish them. In some cases, the bank owned the house and the farm after next year’s crop failure.

But for Christ-followers, the issue is even more pressing. For Christians, we need to take avoiding the lust for immediate gratification very seriously. This includes the very spiritual and practical realms. Jesus said that the most important thing we could do was to love God with all we are, and our neighbor as we love ourselves. The problem with my desire for immediate gratification is that it all about me. I’m not thinking about loving God or loving my neighbor; I’m thinking about me.

So, making a list of things I need to do to “get my fields ready” and things I need to do in order to love God and others is very important. After doing those things, if I have a little time to play games of chess might be just fine. (Well, maybe just one or two.) Otherwise, perhaps it is chess that needs to be crossed off my list—permanently.

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