God’s Impetuous Child Lives At My House

by Kevin Burton

   I actually did this, I promise. Neither Winston Churchill nor any other learned observer from the past, present or future, would have called this “my finest hour.”

   I bring you this, even though there may be somebody reading Page 7 for the first time today. Sheesh.

    There was a time a few years ago when I sat down on the couch downstairs to begin a practice Scrabble round, board on lap, tile bag in hand. But before I could even get started, the very first tile I drew slipped through my fingers and down to the couch and between the couch cushion and the side.

   No, not between the cushions, where I could just reach down and retrieve it, no harm no foul, but into the side, into the guts of the couch.

   And I got mad. Real mad.

The Bible says “He that is slow to anger is better than the nighty, and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city” (Prov 16:32 KJV).

That is now one of my memory verses. But I didn’t have it printed on a little blue index card the day my Scrabble practice went awry. (Good Scrabble word that, “awry.”

So here’s what I “reasoned” and what I said to the Lord who allowed my game piece to disappear into the couch.

“Well, since 99 Scrabble tiles are no good without the 100^th, and since You have allowed the one to fall into the couch, how much better would it be if all the tile went into the couch? If one is good, how much better 100?”

And I sat there and fed tile after tile into the couch.

My memory is that my wife Jeannette was there for the first part of this and left in disgust after I started depositing tiles like quarters into a slot machine, with the same results, getting nothing in return.

My memory is also that my rage subsided sometime before the bag was empty and I only put some of them, a lot of them actually, into the couch. But I also deposited some extra tiles I had from some other set.

And that is where those tiles stayed from that day until about three weeks ago.

Maybe three years ago we got a couch from my mother and we deemed that one superior to the Scrabble couch. We called the trash company and discovered it would only cost $30 to have that couch hauled off.

(It was almost good enough to give to a secondhand store, not quite.)

One final indignity, my wife and I were not able to get that couch beast up the stairs (angle of the landing) and we had to call a neighbor for help. 

But as we were turning that couch this way and that, trying to make it disappear, it began to burp up Scrabble tiles. Dozens of plastic letters on the basement floor, probably forming little editorial comments

The neighbor guy either didn’t see the tiles or didn’t want to hear about how they got into the couch.

That’s a skill I learned later in life: If you think the answer is going to make your head explode, don’t ask the question.

Well I didn’t scrape the couch innards for more tiles, but whatever fell, I kept. I swept the floor for stray letters with a thoroughness seldom seen in the Mancave.

Maybe ten days after that Jeannette and I played a very special game of Scrabble. We played it with my tantrum set. Now remember these tiles actually came from two (or more?) sets. I counted 93 tiles. But we had no idea what letters there would be. There could be two Qs and no Us for all we knew.

For the tantrum set we came up with a new rule, that you drew new tile at random up until the sixth, but for the seventh tile you could look in the box and grab what you wanted.

Lunatic stuff all around I tell you.

The first word Jeannette played was “help” and we went on from there. Turned out there were two Qs and two Ks but no real mayhem other than that

Now I’ve been thinking about writing this post for some time, but thank God I didn’t finish it earlier. Why?

Because at Sunday School last week one of the ladies used a perfect term for my angry Scrabble exploits.

She referred to an earlier period in her life as “my spiritual brat days.”

That’s it! Spiritual brat! How perfect is that?

Only thing is, she seemed to be saying spiritual brat is a place you move through never to return, like your teen years. For me, quite unfortunately, it’s more like a place you return to periodically, like the dry cleaners.

Takeaways? 

First, don’t be reluctant to ask for help when you need it, from a neighbor or more importantly from the Lord. Then there’s the whole Proverbs 16:32 thing.

Also, Scrabble is now something the Burtons do at a table.