Bible Bowl is a game that has pretty much consumed our lives this year. If you are not familiar with Bible Bowl, it is a game-show style buzzer game where kids memorize and study portions of scripture and then answer questions about every minute detail. You wouldn't believe what these kids know. When I started, I thought, hey, I'm pretty good at Bible trivia. No. I'm not. Not at all. These 5th-graders could buzz me right off the table.
We are in our fourth year now. My oldest son has graduated out of it and my other three are still playing. We moved, so we had to switch teams. The people on the old team and on the new team are some of my kids' best friends. They are like family. Our small group. In the past we just attended two big tournaments in the summer, but this year we are doing mid-year tournaments as well. Six tournaments total in addition to our weekly practice an hour and a half away and our monthly regional game that is two and a half hours away. Some people do this with sports. For us, it's Bible memorization. Oh, dear, my husband and I may have raised nerdy kids just like us. He was a band geek, and I played Latin Certamen and was a member of my school's Academic Team in lieu of sports involvement. Not because I'm not interested in sports. I'm just not athletic. At all. Ask anyone who went to high school with me. (For the record, my husband can play sports. But, yeah, he was a band geek anyway.)
But I digress.
So once a week we practice with our team for Bible Bowl, and I'm in charge of the games. They figured maybe I couldn't mess that up too much. We often play minute-to-win-it type games with things like ping-pong balls and red Solo cups. It's all very high-tech. A few weeks ago we played a game where two teams were each trying to fill a bucket with ping-pong balls. The catch was that one person at a time had to run one ping-pong ball over to the bucket. The next person could not start until the first person was back behind the team line. They had two minutes to get as many ping-pong balls as they could into their bucket. Each team was steadily filling its own bucket and we had ten seconds left when . . .
You guessed it. One of the kids accidentally knocked over his bucket.
Ping-pong balls everywhere.
Do you remember how that feels? Do you remember what it feels like to be in middle school playing a game, and then to stumble or drop something or foul something and mess up your team? Do you remember how awful that was? How everyone was mad at you? How it was all your fault that the team went down?
So I got ready to do damage control.
But there was not one. negative. word.
No one yelled, no one called names.
The whole team immediately ran over the team line, rushed to the player's aid, and started helping him as he frantically picked up the balls and put them back in the bucket. They got them all back in before time was called.
Did they technically break the rule of having only one team member over the line at a time? Yeah. If this had been a more serious game than a ping-pong relay, would all the balls have counted? Probably not. Would they be disqualified in a "real" game? Most likely.
But in the game of life, they win. When a player went down, they ran to him. When the goal was almost met but then the balls went everywhere, they salvaged the situation. They high-fived and smiled and built relationships.
Yeah, we have to teach them to play by the rules in Bible Bowl and other games. They are honest and competitive and show good sportsmanship.
And not one of them walks alone.
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