On Bowling Scores and How God Says “Ick”

When it comes to our boys and school, we follow (at least) one general rule around our house: Let the teachers teach.

Of course, it helps that one of the grown-ups in our house is one of those teachers.

And it helps that we school in one of the best districts you’ll find. Our teachers are not only highly qualified (take that, NCLB), but they are of the highest quality. We know them, and we trust them. Around here we can’t help it — we live and buy groceries and drink coffee and worship with them. Teachers live in over half the houses on my block. We were even taught by some of them.

And it also helps that, despite the occasional after-school lament that in one classroom or another there is simply no justice, our boys refuse to allow us to do battle for them. Don’t be, they tell us, those “torch and pitchfork parents” who are always in the office crying about something.

So, with few exceptions, we let the teachers teach.

But those exceptions, they tempt.

With just hours left in classrooms this year, we logged on to the school’s web portal last night to take one final peek at the grades. JP’s gym class grade set our teeth on edge again, just like it has all quarter. How does a guy get 100 percent in every other part of the class except a written bowling test and barely scrape by with a B for the term?

We puzzled. We calculated. We pontificated about grading theory and testing practices and if we were the gym teacher this would never happen. We snorted and stewed and wrote drafts of emails we would never truly send.

Okay, okay, okay. This isn’t about the morality of a grading rubric. It’s really about how keeping score in bowling makes me think of things that make God say Ick.

Straightforward enough, don’t you think?

::

The neighbors heard the gnashing of teeth through our windows when we saw the grade on the bowling score-keeping test for the first time weeks ago.

Over his parents’ red-faced, spittle-punctuated rant about how such a smart kid and good athlete could get a grade like that, JP quickly explained the hopelessness of it all. Because you see, if you get one frame wrong on the bowling score sheet, you get every frame wrong after that.

The score in each frame is dependent on the one before it. So the wrongness in Frame 3 spreads to Frame 4 and Frame 5 and Frame 8 all the way to Frame 10 where your final score is complete rubbish. Even if you do the math right on all the subsequent frames.

And when your test grade barely scrapes its way into existence, it doesn’t matter that the rest of your scores are flawless.

The wrongness spreads.

All the perfect throws and nine-minute miles and brilliance at badminton will not overcome one wrong frame in bowling.

They just won’t.

::

So, God says Ick.

He does.

We looked at Ick on Sunday morning, a group of adults and I around the tables in our Bible study. We considered our best efforts to muster up righteousness on our own, deliver ourselves to God’s feet in our own good standing. One shared how the very best we can do is a pile of stained and smelly rags:

All of us have become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;
we all shrivel up like a leaf,
and like the wind our sins sweep us away. (Isaiah 64:6)

These rags? They aren’t like the ones I just used to dust in my living room. They aren’t shop rags from the garage. These are special purpose rags, of a nature we won’t talk about here in polite company.

Ick.

This is the part of the conversation where I have to go wash my hands.

After Paul listed out his sparkling resume in Philippians 3, clearly demonstrating how he had done anything and everything the law required, he said the same thing. He called it rubbish. The KJV calls it dung.

But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ.

Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ, And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith:  (Philippians 3:8-9 KJV, emphasis added)

Paul knew this thing: that what we have to offer God on our own is not just worthless. It isn’t just not good enough. It’s not just missing the mark.

It’s all of those things, yes.

All of them.

But it is also loss. They serve to our disadvantage, our own efforts.

When I bundle up my good stuff, everything good I can crank out, and lay it up all excited at the Father’s feet because He will be so impressed and delighted with my really cool gift to Him, He says it.

Ick.

He says He doesn’t love my gift of dung wrapped up pretty in nasty smelling rags.

I stood a bit ashamed, me who thinks to be a wordsmith, that the best I had to offer to describe the best we have to offer was Ick.

But it’s the best word I have right now.

Our own righteousness — it doesn’t just fall short.

It offends.

It violates.

And it is good for nothing but burning on the trash heap.

(Please. As soon as you can.)

::

The illustration, it’s pretty small-scale. But when we mess up in the second frame, we can’t make it right in the eighth. And we can’t make it right in another sport.

Our best efforts will not overcome.

The blemish carries over. The stain has set.

The garbage, it stinks.

Putting roses in it won’t make it smell any better.

::

I need Jesus.

I need His righteousness in me.

Right here, right now, this very moment. Trust me.

Nothing else will clean my rags, give me new garments, make me smell good to the Father.

I can’t do it. I just need Jesus.

::

Photo: Bowling by G Schouten de Gel (via stock.XCHNG)

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