As I climbed into the car, my daughter told me that she and her Nana were “playing cards” in the backseat.  After a minute, I realized it was a modified version of “Go Fish”.

“Do you have some 2’s?” she asks her Nana as I pull out of the parking lot.

“Sophia, do you have any 3’s?  Oh, you have a few…and some 5’s!”

At three, my daughter is interested in games and rules.  She is also very imaginative and generous.  And apparently, she has given her Nana more cards than she needed to.

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One of her favorite games is “Silly Socks”.  It is a cute game in which you reach into a cardboard clothes dryer to find matching socks.  The player that matches three pairs of socks wins.  From the first time we played, she would get excited when she would make a match and she certainly enjoyed making three matches and winning.  But one of her most favorite things is to match one of her socks to one of mine so that I can have a match.  As much as she likes to win, she likes it when I win, too.

Just this morning, she wanted to race me to get our shoes on.  It is pretty fair, since she got a head start, but I was putting on sandals.  She beat me by a matter of seconds.  She ran into the kitchen and said “I won!”

“Oh, man!  You just beat me!”

“Daddy won, too!” she shouts.

We gave each other two high fives.

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Rose, my wife, is much more linear than I.  She doesn’t like it when Sophia messes with the rules of the game, and is afraid of raising a child that doesn’t know how to win or lose.  I remind her that I’ve interacted with thousands of people in my life and virtually none of them had any trouble with knowing what it means to win and lose, in fact, they are pretty obsessed with their winning and others losing.  Very few know how to be so generous and interested in watching someone else win as my daughter already is.  Isn’t that something worth preserving?

It makes me wonder about our games and our very understanding of winning as a solitary activity.  Sharing in the spoils of victory is much sweeter than the bragging rights of being the greatest.  And our governments and businesses and churches all trying to be better at the expense of all the rest; it seems so petty and juvenile.

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People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive thekingdomofGodas a little child will never enter it.” (Mark 10:13-15, NRSV)

I’m pretty confident that this little child is just such a one.  The games we all play serve to make us more subservient to rules in the world and the order of our society, encouraging greed and our own desire to win out, blind to the needs of others.  So wouldn’t my imposing such a paradigm onto her be an example of “stopping” her and keeping her from the kingdom, where she belongs?

Hasn’t she been put here to help me?  And you?