Like so many families during the holidays, my family (as in adult brothers and sisters along with their spouses and children) gathered together.
After a wonderful meal, someone pulled out a popular card game called Apples to Apples. The object of the game is to be the first person to collect five green category cards. Each player is dealt seven red cards. During each round a different person picks a green category card and chooses the one card from those red cards played that he or she thinks most resembles the green category card. The green category cards are most often adjectives, while the red cards range from famous actors, inventors, scientists, musicians to innocuous objects like water bottles, or silly things like swinging monkeys.
With fourteen players playing from adults to children, the game offered a variety of potential answers. Naturally, the play is also limited to what the players have in their hands, providing some interesting, or at times, frustrating choices.
We had been playing the game for over two hours — Did I mention that the game is very absorbing and highly addictive, especially when played with a diverse group of outspoken, lively personalities? — when my eleven-year-old daughter pulled out of the pile the green category card “perfect.”
I thought I had nailed the winning card. I had the red card of “Ballerinas.” One of her most favorite things is ballet and to be a good ballerina requires precision, if not perfection.
Little did I know what I was up against. My daughter flipped over most of her choices and only three remained: “Ballerinas, Going to church, and Weddings.” The suspense was intense. Everyone at the table was curious to see what she would pick. After some deliberation, she chose “Going to church.” I did not win the green card, but I won something far more endearing. At least for the time being, all the years of religious instruction and lived faith materialized in an unexpected public moment, ripe for evangelization. Let me add that there were plenty of adults and other children present who would never think of “Going to church” as remotely perfect.
The next turn my brother picked the category “creepy.” It turned out that my niece played the card “The Vatican,” eliciting some raised eyebrows and vocal commentary. Thankfully, my brother did not pick that as the winning card. Where would a young teenage girl get such a strange notion — school, friends, TV, too much Da Vinci Code?
To Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins, and other atheists, who spout religion is “child abuse,” this is a prime example that not teaching children any religion, only letting them float through life and derive their own choices, is an even greater form of “child abuse.” On what could this young girl possibly base her odd connection?
If you have the truth, you share it, with enthusiasm and conviction. It takes faith to believe in atheism. With atheism, you are left bankrupt with nothingness and despair.
If no one ever takes the time to introduce my niece to the truth, she may continue to float through life, suffering from “child abuse,” mistaken ideas about religion and the Catholic faith.
Later that night, when we returned home, my daughter told me if “The Vatican” had been one of the cards she could pick, she would have considered it. But, she added, “You can receive Jesus when you go to church, so I guess I would have chosen that anyway.”
Sometimes God picks the most unusual times and least likely candidates to announce the glory of his love. “Perfect” is “Going to Church.”
