There was a board game that fascinated me as a child, named ‘Mouse Trap’. The game would begin with each of the players working together to build this incredibly elaborate and complicated mouse trap (because we’re so good at naming things for kids). Once the trap was built, it then became a game of trying to trap your opponents’ mouse so that you could get the cheese at the center of the board. It was the kind of game that made me wonder about getting into engineering and building things.
The game itself is built around a ‘Rube-Goldberg’ machine, which is a machine that performs a seemingly simple task (catching a mouse, for example), in a seemingly complicated system (a 17 piece mouse trap). In the moment of it all, you look at this contraption, the path that has been created, and ask a lot of questions: Is this actually going to work? Was that entirely necessary? Is it supposed to look this way?
People often talk about the way God works in our lives as “mysterious”, implying the unseen, unknown elements working together. Scripture talks about it. Pop culture references it (“The Lord works in mysterious ways”). But often times it seems to be so overly complicated and complex, or so loosely held together that many people are left wondering if it was God, or if they just wanted it to be God. (At least, I know I have been left wondering that).
One of my favorite actors/people in the world is Sir Patrick Stewart. I know him best for his portrayal of Jean Luc Picard, from Star Trek: The Next Generation. However, throughout his career as an accomplished actor, Sir Patrick Stewart has become a champion of women’s rights in domestic violence and soldiers struggling with PTSD, in part because of his childhood with an alcoholic, abusive father struggling with PTSD and his mother who suffered abuse at his hand. Because of his tremendous acting ability, as well as his social activism, Patrick Stewart was knighted and became Sir Patrick Stewart.
The Dead Drop 