What I Learned From A Card Game

Hm, a day late and a dollar short again. The demands of summer school have made deadlines difficult, so expect more delays in the future. This is an original piece, and I did a lot of scanning for it. Click on the card images to see an enlarged version.

What I Learned From A Card Game

I like table games. Be they card based or board-game style, I really enjoy them. Why sit around a TV all night when you can humiliate your friends and family at a game of skill and\or luck? I think more families would stick together if people just spent more time interacting with each other instead of passively watching fictitious cars explode.

I’m up for Monopoly, Risk, or even Hungary Hungary Hippos anytime, anywhere. If you know anything about these games, I claim the hat piece, Mexico, and the Green Hippo.

While you could probably derive some important life lessons from a game of Monopoly, I haven’t done so yet. That said, I was playing a card game with my family a few days ago that made me think a little.

That card game is Redemption. Redemption is a Christian Collectable Card Game. What that means is that it is instead of playing with pre-packaged decks of cards, each player constructs their own from the thousands of cards available. Cards come in booster packs and have varying degrees of rarity. My family has really enjoyed this game, and has spent many a Sabbath afternoon playing it since I bought the starter deck at a camp meeting Adventist Book Center ten years ago.

The basic idea of the game is to lead members of your “army of God” in battle against the “army of darkness” in order to rescue “lost souls.” It can be quite a bit more complex than that, but that's the general idea. All of the cards are based on biblical characters and events, even ridiculously obscure ones. Pretty much every bible character you can think of has a card, and quite a few you’ve never heard of have one too.

If you’ve ever wondered how Samson would have faired in a battle against Goliath (probably far better than against Jezebel), you can play it in the game. Or perhaps Simon Peter versus Haman? Ruth versus Judas Iscariot? Joshua versus the Whore of Babylon? It gets weirder than that, trust me.

Anyway, I decided I could make the game weirder than it already was. I used MS Paint to create an “Edward” hero, printed it out and glued it to the front of a worthless card, and surreptitiously slipped it into my deck. I figured that would highly amuse my family.

This meant that I was now a member of the “Army of God”, rubbing shoulders with guys like David, Paul, and Moses. I made my abilities considerably less than that of those characters, but it still felt pretty weird.

I drew the Edward card towards the end of the first game. At that point, I had been using a coalition led by Adino. I don’t really know who that is, but his scriptural reference (2^nd Samuel 23:8) says that he was “the Tachmonite that sat in the seat” and that he killed eight hundred people with his spear. Pretty cool guy. Anyway, he had successfully rescued four lost souls from the hordes of darkness.

Now, I had the Edward card. I was only one rescue away from victory, and figured it was time to reveal myself and win the game. I waited for my turn, and put my card down on the table in attack mode. The target was my brother’s captive souls, and he would have to fight me off, otherwise the game would belong to me.

After passing my ghetto homemade card around and after everybody laughed at it and me, the game went on. I was pretty confident that I had won this battle, after all, I had the “Sound the Alarm” card ready to play, which would allow two heroes to band together to rescue the soul. I would bring in my David card, and the two of us would be unstoppable. David is one of my favorite biblical characters, and I thought it would be pretty cool to win teamed up with him.

My brother didn’t put out an evil character to battle me though. Instead, he slammed the “Christian Martyr” card down on top of the “Edward” card. For those of you unfamiliar with a game, the “Christian Martyr” card means instant non-arguable death for a hero.

I had just been martyred. My turn was over. That was pretty unkind of him to do to his own brother. I should have attacked my mother instead. She ended up winning the game.

Thus my short foray into the realm of spiritual warfare ended.

Or has it? This experience made me start thinking about the heroes of the Bible. Some of them accomplished some pretty impressive things. Those of us raised in the church have had their stories drilled into our heads over and over again since cradle roll. It becomes easy to assign them legendary or superhuman status, to the point that we forget that they were all just like us: human.

Don’t tell me David wasn’t scared as he ran from Saul. Don’t tell me Daniel didn’t have his doubts as he was thrown into the lion’s den. Don’t tell me Noah worked on the Ark for a hundred years and never once considered that he may be insane. Don’t tell me Joshua never lost a little hope of making it to the Promised Land. Don’t tell me the constant beatings and stonings and shipwrecks and imprisonments never caused Paul’s enthusiasm to waver.

They weren’t working with anything that we don’t have. Arguably, it could be said that we have more than they did, what with the New Testament and religious liberty being the way it is. Still, they went out and did God’s will. They slipped up from time to time, as no person is without their Bathsheba moment, but ultimately they triumphed. They felt all the same emotions that we do, but the Bible still records them as heroes in The Army of God.

And there’s no reason we can’t overcome our weaknesses and enlist as well. I got “martyred” pretty quickly when I went out rescue “lost souls.” Are we willing to make that kind of commitment? Death doesn’t frighten me, but other things do.

I’m seriously considering going as a student missionary next year. Dedicating a year to God sounds like a very good thing, and I would very much like to do it. Still, I am reminded of the reasons I haven’t already done it. Just as I’m ready to make a commitment, my mind brings up a very plausible scenario of the negative things that might occur back home if I’m gone for a year. Still, the only reasons I can think of not to go are wholly selfish. God told Abraham to march across the desert into the unknown, national borders don’t seem all that bad in comparison.

Regardless of all this, in the game of Redemption, and in the reality of life, there are only two factions: The Army of God and The Army of Darkness. One cannot serve in the Army of God if they want only to please themselves. Risks must be taken, and we can only hope for the strength to take them. It’s the same dilemma faced by every Bible hero you can think of, and we must face it too.