Trivial Pursuit - Pt 1

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27 ESV).

Trivial Pursuit was conceived on December 15, 1979 by Chris Haney and Scott Abbott. Haney was a picture editor at the Montreal Gazette, and Abbott was a sports journalist for The Canadian Press. The friends were playing a game of Scrabble and drinking beer when they decided to invent their own game. Since then, more than 100 million copies of the game had been sold in as many as 26 countries and in at least 17 languages! Howevrer, it has not been without criticism. In 2006, Julian Fellows, accused the makers of the game of “dumbing it down intentionally to make it more popular. Fellows, himself an Oscar-winning writer of Gosford Park who went on to make Downton Abbey, said: "It reflects an endless degrading of everything. One just feels old when confronted with things like this, but I thought that the idea of the game was to stimulate a desire for knowledge. It's not the fault of the game's makers. The makers of Trivial Pursuit are having to reflect the collapse of education in this country." I enjoy playing the game from time to time. I don’t know if that means I’m smart or dumb! I seem to have amassed a lot of information through the years; and, that enables me to do well. However, it also may indicate a superficial body of knowledge. That superficial mind-set seems to reflect our present culture. It also touches on an issue that is epidemic among human beings in general, in every age, and perhaps more than ever in our age of ever-present distraction by superficial input from every manner of media. The epidemic I’m talking about is the tragic loss of wonder and amazement in the face of the beauties and glories in the world and in the word and in our own selves. Our reading today declares we are made in the image of God, full of potential to know God and to know things the way God knows them and feel with the affections that even God has in his own heart. Yet we are merely “glorious ruins.” We have fallen. We go to visit the magnificent Rockies, or Alps or Himalayas and, for a day or two, we are breathless with amazement. By the end of the week, we’re sitting in front of the television in our chalet on top of the mountain, watching pitiful, human, cinematic efforts to create amazement. That’s just who we are. It’s tragic. It’s one of the great, tragic effects of the fall. We are plagued with superficiality in a world of wonder, easily bored, and rarely awed. We must awaken from this stupor and rebuild a mind-set that might help us pursue a meaningful life. That’s the premise we’ll build upon in the next few days. Today, intentionally look for the wonder of God in your life. Marvel at the things that have been placed in each of you routine steps of life today. It might amaze you! It will certainly stretch you beyond the trivial.