John Ortberg - When the Game Is Over, It All Goes Back in the Box

One of the lessons (besides the primary message of this book) that my grandmother taught was to say thank-you, and it is a pleasure to do so to people who have helped make this book a reality. My daughter Laura devoted the better part of a summer to do research and help shape it, and she has been over each draft with a fine-tooth comb.

Although it is generally wise never to switch horses in the middle of a stream, I got to work with two unusually generous and helpful editors this time around. Jack Kuhatschek is an old friend, and John Sloan is a new one, and both of them are alarmingly creative editors. The entire team at Zondervan is a joy to partner with, as is Trudi Barnes, who works in the office right next to mine.

Also, I am deeply grateful to the congregation I serve in Menlo Park for making the time available for me to write, and to the men of integrity who meet on Saturday mornings and hold me up in prayer.

I am grateful to my father and mother and sister and brother for teaching me so much of how to play and live. So this book is lovingly dedicated to John and Kathy and Barbara and Barton.

And to Gram.

And, as always, to Nancy.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations marked MSG are taken from THE MESSAGE. Copyright by Eugene H. Peterson 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, IL 60189 USA. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyrighted 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America, and are used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked Phillips are taken from The New Testament in Modern English, revised edition J. B. Phillips, translator. J. B. Phillips 1958, 1960, 1972. Used by permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.

Scripture quotations marked TNIV are taken from the Holy Bible, Todays New International Version. TNIV. Copyright 2001, 2005 by Biblica. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

T his resource is just one of many ministry tools published in partnership with the Willow Creek Association. Founded in 1992, WCA was created to serve churches and church leaders striving to create environments where those still outside the family of God are welcomedand can more easily consider Gods loving offer of salvation through faith.

These innovative churches and leaders are connected at the deepest level by their all-out dedication to Christ and His Kingdom. Willing to do whatever it required to build churches that help people move along the path toward Christ-centered devotion; they also share a deep desire to encourage all believers at every step of their faith journey, to continue moving toward a fully transformed, Christ-centered life.

Today, more than 10,000 churches from 80 denominations worldwide are formally connected to WCA and each other through WCA Membership. Many thousands more come to WCA for networking, training, and resources.

For more information about the ministry of the Willow Creek Association, visit: willowcreek.com.

This is our predicament.
Over and over again, we lose sight of
what is important and what isnt.
E PICTETUS

My grandmother had just gotten out of jail.

She was a roll away from the yellow properties. And the yellow properties meant trouble. They were mine. And they had hotels. And Gram had no money. She had wanted to stay in jail longer to avoid landing on my property and having to cough up dough she did not have, but she rolled doubles, and that meant her bacon was going to get fried.

I was a ten-year-old sitting at the Monopoly table. I had it all money and property, houses and hotels, Boardwalk and Park Place. I had been a loser at this game my whole life, but today was different, as I knew it would be. Today I was Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Ivan the Terrible. Today my grandmother was one roll of the dice away from ruin. And I was one roll of the dice away from the biggest lesson life has to teach: the absolute necessity of arranging our life around what matters in light of our mortality and eternity. It is a lesson that some of the smartest people in the world forget but that my grandmother was laser clear on.

For my grandmother taught me how to play the game....

Golda Hall, my mothers mother, lived with us in the corner bedroom when I was growing up. She was a greathearted person. She was built soft and round, the way grandmothers were before they took up aerobics. She remains, at least in the memories of my boyhood, the most purely fun person I have known. She let us stay up later than we were supposed to on Friday nights when our parents were gone. She peeled apples for us, told us ghost stories and scary old poems (Little Orphan Annie came to our house to stay...) that kept us awake for hours. She baked banana bread that was like having dessert for breakfast and made us red velvet cake which consists mostly of butter on our birthdays.

And she taught me how to play the game.

My grandmother was a game player, and she did not like to lose. She didnt get mean or mad, but she still (to use an expression from her childhood world) had some snap in her girdle. It was part of her charm. Every Friday night as long as my grandfather was alive, the whole family, including spouses, would gather to play a card game called Rook; and if you were Grams partner, it was not wise to miss a trick or lose the bid. Everyones favorite old home movie featured Gram playing in a softball game at a family picnic in her younger days. She made contact with the ball and ran the bases with such singleness of purpose a large woman coming at you like Bronco Nagurski that no one got in her way. Home run. When she played Chinese checkers with small grandchildren, she was not one of those pushover grandmothers who would lose on purpose to make the grandchildren feel better about themselves. Gram believed before Max De Pree ever said it that a leaders first task is to define reality. She was the leader, and the reality was that she played to win. Pouting and self-pity, two of my spiritual gifts, did not elicit sympathy from her, for even when she was playing, she kept an eye on what kind of person you were becoming. And my grandmother taught me how to play the game.

Grandmother was at her feistiest when it came to Monopoly. Periodically leaders like General Patton or Attila the Hun develop a reputation for toughness. They were lapdogs next to her. Imagine that Vince Lombardi had produced an offspring with Lady MacBeth, and you get some idea of the competitive streak that ran in my grandmother. She was a gentle and kind soul, but at the Monopoly table she would still take you to the cleaners.