‘Two things I ask of you, Lord;
do not refuse me before I die.
-Agur, about 970 B.C.
O Lord two things I thee require, That thou me not deny
But that I may the fruit thereof
Receive before I die.
-Beginning of Poem of John Hall (1627–1656)
Three things make the earth unquiet
And four she cannot brook
The godly Agur counted them
And put them in a book…
-Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936)
Whenever we have a long drive, my family plays games: the alphabet game in which we try to find a word starting with every letter of the alphabet, in order, before we reach our destination (Q’s and X’s are usually the toughest!), or ghost, where each person adds a letter to a word, strategically trying to choose letters that will force the others playing to finish off the word and thus lose that round. Or we play twenty questions where someone picks a “person, place, or thing” and the others can ask up to 19 yes or no questions to discover and name that person, place, or thing. The games builds our relationships in competition with one another and make the drive go much faster.
Life itself is a long and often perplexing journey. The mysterious path we walk from birth to death is taxing. The more we learn about our situation in the grand scheme of things, the more life itself seems overwhelming. Consider, for example:
That as a human, you are 1 of 8.5 million species living on this planet.
That as an individual on planet Earth, you represent only 0.000000000125% of the present human population.
That all 8 billion of us share only 1 of an estimated 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets in the Milky Way Galaxy.
And that our galaxy is only 1 of between 6 and 20 trillion galaxies in the universe.
Mystery upon humbling percentages upon incomprehensible numbers upon unimaginable size. If we think about this data too deeply, we begin to feel lost and ungrounded. Agur, the author of chapter 30 of the book of Proverbs in the Bible, knows exactly what we are experiencing:
Who has gone up to heaven and come down?
Whose hands have gathered up the wind?
Who has wrapped up the waters in a cloak?
Who has established all the ends of the earth?
What is his name, and what is the name of his son?
Surely you know! -Proverbs 30:4
Like on a long drive, what we really need on this journey through life is a game we can play. Thankfully, those who have gone before us, including Agur son of Jakeh, have developed playful approaches to the mystery of life. Not only this but they have made it into a purposeful game. They have found that playing these games is a spiritual experience; that is, they can take us from being overwhelmed by mystery to the experience of gratitude and even praise.
Here is a step by step way we can join in the game:
Dare to look into the vast mysteries of life as you experience them.
Catalogue 20 things that catch your attention. Here is a seemingly random collection of 20 things that caught Agur’s attention in his day:
the way of a snake on a rock.
a servant who becomes king.
the grave.
the way of a ship on the high seas.
the courage of a lion.
a godless fool who gets plenty to eat.
ants that store up their food in the summer.
the barren womb.
a strutting rooster.
a contemptible woman who gets married.
and the way of a man with a young woman.
land, which is never satisfied with water.
hyraxes who make their home in the crags.
fire.
the way of an eagle in the sky.
a servant who displaces her mistress.
locusts that advance together in ranks without a king.
a lizard found in a king’s palace.
the walk of a goat.
the stately walk of a king.
Now consider some common categories for the things you have catalogued. In Proverbs 30, Agur uses the following categories:
Things too amazing
Things never satisfied
Things that threaten chaos
Things small but wise
Things that inspire by the way they carry themselves.
Next look through your list and gather together some things that seem quite unrelated at first, but which share one of your categories. For example, out of the list above, Agur noticed four of his twenty mysterious things that caused him wonder and awe.
the way of an eagle in the sky.
and the way of a man with a young woman.
the way of a snake on a rock.
the way of a ship on the high seas.
Disguise them by numbering them (anything from 3 to 10) under the common category in a way that invites people to guess what things you have in mind. Here is how Agur introduces his game:
There are three things that are too amazing for me,
four that I do not understand…Finally, to add to the playfulness by making the last the most unusual (in this case, amazing) of all.
‘There are three things that are too amazing for me,
four that I do not understand:
the way of an eagle in the sky,
the way of a snake on a rock,
the way of a ship on the high seas,
and the way of a man with a young woman.
Agur’s final product takes us from the profusion of millions of unrelated things in life, to four that unexpectedly share something in common, to a wonder and awe that we will experience the next time we see an eagle in the sky. If we’re not careful, the next time we see the ocean or attend a wedding, we may find ourselves giving thanks to God for the mystery and wonder of life!
