I am sure that I am not the only one who here knows what Tetris is. For those of you born in the age of candy crush saga and PS4 , you may not be reading this, and those who are between these ages , be honest, Tetris probably had been your first game, or a game in your first digital toy. This article is a tribute to the game Tetris because it can solve a lot of issues. Here is the first kind.
Space management:
Tetris is a tile matching game but more importantly it is also a shape matching game. For the sake of those who do not just remember it, here is how it is. You have to place blocks of same colour and suiting shapes to finish the never ending puzzle. For example the is a "T" shaped block and it will not match with an "L" shaped block. But together they could accommodate a "Square" block.
I never found this task useful till recent when we brought a freezer at home. Our fridge had run over with items we had brought on bulk from Costco. The freezer was a square prism. Our initial thoughts were to dump all frozen food material into the freezer but this would not be accepted by mum.
My engineering mind ran a series of algorithms and the best option I could think of was to measure the surface areas of all material and use some fast sort algorithms to solve this issue. Common sense however was against me because it meant that all the frozen food would be thawed by the time I finished calculations and this felt like the dumbest idea ever. So we played Tetris.we gathered all food that we were moving to the freezer and selected shaped food and dropped it and arranged it one by one. Mum was beside to direct which food was more important and had to go in last. In the end all the odd shaped Chicken and peas and fish went in. Game over. ( Ours was not an infinity freezer ) .
How does this involve with Church?
Well as I thought about this , a perspective I had on the gifts of the God was remided of. In the Bible we learn that some extra ordinary gifts were given to people at regular occasions. Some were given the ability to pray more , others the ability to pray for healing and others the ability to disern. Some others were given wisdom beyond measure, others knowledge and insight into lives, others the faith that surpasses all forms of logical reasoning ( like learning to trust God in midst of a hurricane ) . All these together added to the early Church a tremendous and explosive growth. How come? Well they worked in synergy between each other. Assume this, a lame man is brought to the Church for healing. The person for wisdom pays to understand how this man was hurt and the person with knowledge knows where the hurt was. Together with the rest of the Church they pray for healing and restoration of the weakened parts and God heals the man. The person with faith presses the Church on even while they wait and the miracle just happens as ordinary.
We are ordinary people with extraordinary gifts to make the supernatural - natural.
NB: The game Tetris also has been effective in helping patients with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and psychology today has a brilliant article on this.
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