Pachinko God – Life Beyond Decisions
Brian Mork © August 2009
Very many Christians have a life to live. If they accepted Christ as their savior in childhood years, they have already navigated all the decisions of teen-age-hood. They’ve considered relationships with the opposite sex, and considered the big questions of, “Will I or won’t I?” I know of one young woman who used language similar to a policemen, referring to “turning oneself in” for an illicit kiss when Mom and Dad were out of the room. There were many decisions about friends, sports, college years.
Later the decisions have to do with vocation, girlfriends or boyfriends, spouses, family, children (if and when), jobs, income, living location, job changes, vacations, home purchase, moves, taxes, investments, family members, retirement decisions. The list is endless and growing in American society where we’ve accumulated so many freedoms – freedoms to choose without externally inflicted ramifications.
Have you ever seen a pachinko board? For the mathematically inclined, a Pachinko board is a gambling implementation of Pascal’s triangle. A typical Pachinko board is a slanted board with an array of nails protruding. If you drop a ball in the center at the top, it bounces down, hitting nails, and bouncing to the left or to the right. After many rows of nails, the ball will come to rest on the bottom of the board. Most of the balls land near the middle. Some few number go way out left. Some few number go way out to the right. If you plot how many balls land at what horizontal position, you’ll get a Gaussian distribution.
Most Christians view their life this way, where the horizontal axes is godliness – very bad on the left, very good on the right. No, I don’t want to divert into a conversation of work’s righteousness. We’re not talking about self-aware decisions, looking for salvation because of all the good decisions we’ve made in life. Instead, I’m talking about honest to goodness godliness.
Many Christians believe that godliness is a aggregate of good decisions. Life gains a character of many decisions, and at each decision, a person can make a decision for God (bounce to the right of the nail), or a decision that sort of ignores God’s ways this time (bounce tot the left of the nail).
As observed in real life, most people come out somewhere in the middle of the Pechinko board of life. Some decisions are heartily made for God. Others do not include God very much at all. If a person makes lots of decisions against God’s ways, you end up on the left side of the pachinko board. Many decisions for God and you end up on the right side of the pachinko board. Bad, medium, and good spread out across the spectrum.
As an example, consider some big things of life. Do you know someone who chose a path of divorce rather than reconciling a marriage? Maybe you count this as a bad decision (bounce left). However, maybe this bad bounce is mitigated by giving significantly of yourself toward public service (lots of bounces to the right). Many people mentally sort of average this all out like the Gaussian distribution of a pachinko board, and if they don’t end too far to the bad side, they figure they’re doing fine. Life becomes the geometric summation of hundreds of little decisions.
This is particularly amenable to an America perspective of Christianity. Hearty, adventurous effort leads to a good place. As a Christian, perhaps you want to stay far from works righteousness, so you accept a more Catholic view. In this view, if you or your parents got it right once, then pretty much God’s grace will cover you for the rest. It’s still your goal or task to make the right decisions, but if you don’t, God is always there to supernaturally bias your bounces toward the correct side, and when the game ends with your passing into eternity, you believe it’s mostly God’s doing that ended you up on one side of the board or the other.
Or, perhaps you accept a more fundamentalist view. In this view, one nail is MUCH bigger than the others. Get this decision right, then all the other decisions don’t matter. God’s grace protects you, and because of the one BIG decision, then you’ll tip more the right way on all the little decisions.
If you’re associated with certain church denominations in America, you’ll tend to see life as a single big decision – more important than the others. That was the time in your life when you decided to (or not to) accept Christ as your savior. In fact, most people have a lot of chances to do so throughout life, each time bouncing to the left. Eventually, if you count yourself among the saved, you bounced to the right and decided that Christ’s way was your way.
Even if you count one nail bigger and more important than the others, many times before and many times after, you will still be confronted with temptations that you’ll continue to make decisions about.
I believe many people live as if the Pachinko view of God is true. I agree with Francis Schaeffer that a person’s beliefs drive how they live. So, even if I don’t know many others’ beliefs, I can observe their lives. And their lives point toward a belief that God is there to help you make right decisions through out life.
Big change in direction. I believe the real truth is that all the nailed decision points and ball bouncings are a horribly incorrect analogy about the truth of life. True relationships and godliness looks different than this.
I suspect there is only one decision to be made. To the fundamentalists among the crowd, I want to be clear that I’m not talking about a “salvation decision”. Statistically averaged across America, such a decision does NOT bias a life one way or the other. All the maladies of real life that a person controls with choice affect saved Christians as much as others.
Rather, I’m speaking about a commitment that your life belongs to God, and his ways will frame your options and availability of choices and decisions. I don’t, and you shouldn’t, care “where you end up”. Christianity or godliness is not a vending machine that you put in your life (Catholic) or your decision (Baptist), and get out eternal salvation, or even happiness. This is not the type of decision I’m talking about.
I’m talking about something much more spread out in time, applicable in life where rubber meets the road, but intellectually integral and with fidelity to apply to all things. It has the dynamic range to apply to the big things (death) and little things (tying a shoe lace).
This decision becomes an inversion of the world, seeing things with His eyes first, and then beginning to love others by working to understand the world as they see it. Constantly inviting others to join Christ in the way you have chosen. Concepts of bravery or social intrepidness are measured on a scale you no longer recognize as significant. Nothing is holy and nothing is unholy, Greek or Gentile, Jew, Slave or Freeman. It’s all irrelevant in the scope of a larger commitment. Paul wrote about this in his New Testament writings. Peter Mayer sings about this in his song “Everything is Holy Now”.
Rather than make decisions at each nail on the pachinko board, this paradigm is more like tilting the entire board. Our heart and decisions are turned toward God and the individual decisions don’t need to be individually made.
Consider the example of a wedding vow. It is intended to be forever – something powerful and lasting till death separates. Whereas in reality, it is powerless in and of itself. Only the little daily choices to stay in a marriage are what become reality. Someone who celebrates making a wedding vow 50 years ago really celebrates 50 years of choosing to not break it.
The big decision or life view I’m talking about has the dynamic range to include both: one big commitment, and zillions of little commitments that dovetail with the big one. Do you let the vow determine your choices? Or do you let your day to day choices exhibit your cumulative faithfulness to the vow? Or do you do both?
Let’s apply this to a few life scenarios.
There is no job choice. There is work that God provides to you so that you can provide for those you love.
There is no spouse choice. There is a continual offering of your heart and life to others, and God may put someone in your life that you are particularly well partnered with so that they need exactly what you can give. At the same time, their way constantly pulls you toward seeing things with God’s eyes. That person will be your spouse. You don’t know what they look like. They may be physically beautiful. Maybe not. They may be tall, or short, or fat, or thin. Probably their personality and family background is a bit different than what you expect, too.
There is no choice of where to live.
There is no choice of how to care for parents.
There is no choice of how to raise children.
Life is not a pachinko board where you have to choose God’s ways each time. Choose God. Choose to believe God. I didn’t say believe IN God. Simply (and more powerfully), believe God. Let his hand measure out what decisions you have to make. You may never have to choose a job if you’re a missionary out of college. If you’re in the military, you may never choose where to live. Once you’ve decided on contraceptive methods (if any), you will never have to choose if you should or should not have another child. Your life investments will never have to be in the “right” place because a simple responsibility and disciplined approach will yield the returns that God chooses for you. Risky is not right. Conservative is not right.
If you can get your head and heart around the non-pachinko view of life, all the little bouncing nail decision points fade out of your life. This is the peace that passes all understanding.
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