Tic Tac Toe

By Andrea Lingle

Tic Tac Toe is a stupid game, but it gets us. Whoever goes first, claims the center of the board, and doesn’t miss anything big at least won’t lose.

We really, really want life to be this way. We scramble to get our kids into the best schools, onto the best teams, and exposed to the best opportunities. Because of course we do. We push our churches to grow, reach more people, change more lives!! Because bigger and bigger and bigger makes us feel insulated from the persistent tapping of despair. We expand our following, we leverage our reach, increase our influence because we need to know that we matter.

I want the center of the board to keep my Xs out ahead of your Os.

But, you have to admit, Tic Tac Toe is pretty boring.

Several years ago, we found some tadpoles in the yard and wanted to watch them grow up into frogs. While they were in the tadpole stage, they did fine with fish food, but once they were froglets, I figured we needed to feed them bugs. Ants are easy to find and catch. We presented our froglets with little black ants for a snack. Most of you already know what happened, but I will confess to the rest of the story. The ants immediately began to attack and eat the froglets. And we were horrified. We tweezered the froglets out of the jaws of the ants to a soundtrack of wailing elementary voices (and one adult voice) and returned our froglets to the wild. I don’t think we even considered the fact that we had tried to murder the ants. We would have been fascinated by the frogs eating the ants, but when the ants reversed the paradigm, we panicked.

Salvation forces us to ask, what are we being saved from. In the Progressive community, the doctrine of original sin has become unworkable. I resonate with this, but, if I am honest, there seems to be something pretty violent about the world. Frogs do eat bugs. Ants, apparently, eat froglets. But this isn’t sin. Sin is something different. Something that looks like violence and suffering, but also abrupts love.

Sin refuses the flow of love that says life should be abundant for everyone, and nothing could increase your access to love except the expansion of love itself. You are already there. We are already there.

Love insists that the Tic Tac Toe board is actually a dance floor.