"Don't Move Until You See It"

Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him (Psalm 37:7).

You don’t have to be an athlete to have a favorite sports movie. I’ve never placed a foot in a boxing ring, never been in the same room with one as far as I know, but I love Rocky (the sequels get increasingly predictable). I never played football, but I love Rudy and Remember the Titans. And what about The Rookie and Hoosiers and Seabiscuit? I even felt a surge of adrenaline at the sappy Disney film Racing Stripes. There’s just something powerful about contests of skill and strength and endurance. They are inherently dramatic.

This past weekend I re-discovered one of my favorite sports movies. The sport is chess. The movie is Searching For Bobby Fisher. I don’t play chess, and I’m not going to argue whether chess is actually a sport. Seems to me it has as much right to be called a sport as golf or bowling. Definitions aside, the movie evoked in me some of the same responses as those other films. Strange as it may be, there’s some high drama in this movie.

Searching For Bobby Fisher is about a seven year old kid, Josh Waitzkin. I guess he’s what we would call a prodigy. After observing some men playing a rapid game of chess in a park, he gets it. He grasps the game, understands it. He’s gifted. Among other story lines, the movie tells of his rise in the national rankings.

As with almost every sports movie, the drama reaches its height in a contest that takes place at the end of the film. Josh has encountered a player whom he fears. Another incredibly gifted kid – but different than Josh. This kid is like a cold predator at the chess board. He has quiet ways of taunting. He isn’t playing a game, he’s hunting. His face is expressionless, like some kind of shark staring at you from the other side of the board. After battling his fears (and they are multi-layered) Josh ends up facing this player for the national title.

They play each other countering move with move until Josh looses a key piece, the queen, to his opponent. He’s appears to be stuck, slightly shaken. As he eyes the board his teacher is in another room (with all the hyper-competitive parents) watching the match by video feed. At this very moment his teacher sees the way to victory. He speaks softly as if coaching Josh.

“You’ve got him Josh . . . it’s only twelve moves away . . . don’t move until you see it.”

Oddly, the drama of the game is unfolding as two people sit quietly across from each other. The action is captured only by movements of the eyes, movements that reflect the workings of the mind. As Josh gazes at the board he remembers a time when his teacher abruptly swept the board clean, knocking every piece across the hardwood floor, forcing Josh to visualize the moves in his mind. Now with a national title at stake, Josh creates a vacant board in his mind and sees the moves unfolding.

All the while, his teacher coaches with a whisper “don’t move until you see it.”

It takes strength to wait. At some level we all know this. Many of us confess to not being patient people, not being able to get still and wait. It’s torture. Thus, actually waiting demands a certain kind of strength. We know this, and yet our culture has given us a de facto definition of waiting as weakness and passivity, a form of laziness. But you can’t see deeply into things, into life, when you’re hurried. A frenetic life doesn’t allow a person to visualize twelve moves ahead. Eugene Peterson observes that “patience is a difficult condition to come to terms with in a technology-saturated culture that is impatient – worse, contemptuous – of slowness.”[1]

When we’re stuck, not sure what’s next, shaken by a direct hit life has dealt to us, patient waiting is excruciating. But our biblical ancestors understood that waiting patiently before the Lord is required of those who desire to live whole and well. Isaiah reminds us that those who wait on the Lord will be renewed in strength, mounting up with wings, walking, running without growing weary. How often does the Psalmist resolve to wait patiently before the Lord? Granted, this waiting isn’t always something the Psalmist delights in. Sometimes the question is posed, “how long must I wait?” (Ps. 119:84). Still, waiting is the fundamental posture of a prayerful life. We bring our requests, our needs, our lives before God, offering them as a sacrifice, waiting in expectation (Ps. 5:3).

And yet, the life of faith cannot be all about waiting. The counsel of Josh Waitzkin’s teacher doesn’t always work for those who seek to life a life of faith, following Jesus. If we resolve to not “move until we see it,” we’ll likely never move. In our waiting before the Lord we rarely get full disclosure, all twelve moves, the winning resolution. Sometimes we simply have to make a move. Moves 2-12 remain a mystery, but we can take step one. That God asks this of us is seen in his call to Abraham. “Go to a land I will show you.” (Gen. 12:1) The movements of the Spirit cannot be discerned like the movements of a chess game. It’s far more mysterious, like wind, moving where it will.

The Christian life is lived in this tension. We wait patiently, not driven by the demands around us or the anxieties within us. And yet we are not content simply to wait, and waiting until all the moves are clear is often a failure to trust. Living in this tension constitutes the drama of our lives, real life drama.

And in these ordinary, daily dramas, far more than a national title is at stake.

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[1] Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, p. 337.