Life Lessons from MarioKart - Volume 2

I like playing MarioKart. Recently I have been trying to achieve a star ranking on each of the Grand Prix sets. I started this because 1) it's more fun if you're playing towards a goal and 2) achieving star rank in all 8 sets on a particular level is supposed to unlock something in the game.

Imagine how upset I was when after many, many, MANY attempts I finally won star ranking on the final race in the set... and didn't win anything.

Sometimes it seems like we work and work and work for something, and when we finish, the reward just isn't there. Our spiritual lives can feel like that. We read our Bibles, spend some time in prayer, and still life seems like a huge mess. Where is the reward?

Well, in MarioKart the reward is that I'm now a much better player. I've spent some quality time with my kids playing the game. I've discussed strategies with my husband. I got a blog post out of it. And, possibly most importantly, I'm that much closer to being able to kick my brother's tail in our next MarioKart rematch.

In our spiritual lives the reward is so much bigger. We've spent some quality time with the Creator of the Universe. We've discussed theology with our fellow Christians. We get something to think about. And, possibly most importantly, we're that much more ready to handle the next curve ball life throws at us.

Life Lessons from MarioKart

I love MarioKart. It's almost an obsession. I, however, am married to a minister and that means life lessons can be gleaned from anything. ;) If you aren't familiar with the game, you race cars with driven by characters from the Mario Brothers games. Along the racetracks are little blocks with question marks on them. When you hit the blocks you get something that will help you, hinder you, or let you hinder your opponents. You never know what you're going to get when you drive through one of those question mark blocks - it's the luck of the draw.

One thing I have learned in playing the game is that no matter how lucky you are in the items you receive from the boxes, if you don't drive well you're going to lose. I think writing, and just about anything else you set out to do in life, is a lot like that. There are things in life that spur us forward - good luck, blessings, whatever you chose to call them - and there are things that set us back. But life is made up of so much more than all of those things. We have to learn how to "drive well".

1 Corinthians 9:24 says "Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize." In MarioKart, if you spend your race running into the walls and falling off cliffs, and then depend on getting stars and bullets to help you cross the finish line - you will lose. God calls us to live our lives well. To run in such a way that we can win. Life may offer us some pretty large setbacks. We may get totally squished as people who are bigger or faster than us run us over. And we may not "win" the prize in the world's eyes. But God will know if we ran to win or waited on Him to drop blessings out of the sky.