I shot the moon!

Don’t fret; I don’t mean that literally. In our free time here, we’ve been playing a lot of random games like bananagrams, settlers, hearts, up and down the river, and Dutch blitz. Shooting the moon is a term used in the card game hearts. I had never played that game before, but I thought it was about time I learned since everyone here loves it so much. I played 2 games today and shot the moon in each of them! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s the basic idea: In hearts, you deal out all the cards. Then you all take turns going in a circle laying down a card. You have to follow suit each hand, unless you don’t have it, then you can play whatever you want. In every round there are 26 possible points- the queen of spades is worth 13 and all the hearts are worth 1 each. You don’t want points so normally you try not to get these cards…. except for one important exception, shooting the moon. This is where you try to get all the hearts in a single round. If you do, everyone else gets 26 points! But it’s really risky because if you get don’t get all 13, you get points for every heart you do have.

So why am I talking about cards when you want to hear about my adventures in Ireland? Well, go with me on this… in some ways it reminded me of life. Sometimes we take risks and get badly burned. But other times if we are committed, it can work out. You never really know which way it will go. It’s like what we learned about tonight at the Bible Study we go to on Tuesday nights with people we met at church. We’re going through the book of Exodus. Tonight, we talked about Moses going before Pharaoh and the 10 plagues. Now Moses took a huge risk in confronting Pharaoh and he knew it. In fact, he tried to talk God out of the whole idea at the burning bush. But God knew what was best and pushed him along. In the end, God was right (of course!). The Israelites were allowed to leave Egypt and Moses is remembered as an amazing leader.

I don’t know, maybe the analogy stretches a little thin in some ways, but I think it kinda works. I guess what I’m taking away from our discussion tonight and what I want to encourage you to do is: trust God. Even when it seems absolutely crazy and you’re not sure if it will work. You never know; you might shoot the moon.