The futility of playing Hearts

Here's a confession: sometimes, when I have a very long To Do List, instead of tackling it I find myself playing Hearts on the computer. It's a game for four people, but the computer generously provides you with three virtual opponents, whom you are free to name. I called mine Ernest, George and Leonard, after the characters in my favourite A A Milne poem. (Ernest, in case you don't know, was an elephant; Leonard was a lion; George was a goat; and James - with whom I strongly identify - was "a very small snail".)

But I digress. (Though isn't digressing fun?) Sometimes when I play Hearts I get despondent. Because the way this game works is that you play one round after another (I think the official term is "trick", like in Bridge) and your points accumulate, and go on accumulating until someone reaches at least 100 and then the game ends (with the lowest score being the winning score). So if you have a few awful rounds, you get to the point when you start to feel that this is a pointless exercise (if pointless is the right word to use here in this context...) as you have no chance of winning the game when you're carrying all these awful points from previous rounds - even if you do really well in the next round, you don't feel like you stand a chance.

And I find myself thinking: this is a bit like life without Jesus. You make some mistakes, you do some stupid things, and you go around carrying the guilt from the past and you feel: well, there's no point being good, no matter how good I'll be in the next round, I'm carrying so much guilt from the previous rounds... I was thinking about this recently when reading the book Brick Lane by Monica Ali (an excellent book, by the way) - the main character is a Moslem woman who ends up having an adulterous affair. It doesn't stop her devout praying etc, but she very clearly feels that after what she has done she is heading for hell and that's it, there's no chance of a pardon.

When I finish a game of Hearts and start a new game, I get to start with a clean slate - no previous points. So I start out feeling hopeful: this time I'll do better. Of course I don't always do better, but every time I start a new game I get this new hope. Thank you Jesus that through you I have this hope in real life!