Frank Laubach writes of his "Game with Minutes": "[It] is a rather lighthearted name...Many of us have found it to be enormously helpful. It is a new name for something as old as Enoch, who 'walked with God.' It is a way of living which nearly everybody knows and nearly everybody has ignored. Students will at once recognize it as a fresh approach to Brother Lawrence's 'Practicing the Presence of God.'"
"We call this a 'game' because it is a delightful experience and an exhilarating spiritual exercise; but we soon discover that it is far more than a game. Perhaps a better name for it would be 'an exploratory expedition,' because it opens out into what seems at first like a beautiful garden; then the garden widens into a country; and at last we realize that we are exploring a new world. This may sound like poetry, but it is not overstating what experience has shown us. Some people have compared it to getting out of a dark prison and beginning to LIVE. We still see the same world, yet it is not the same, for it has a new glorious color and a far deeper meaning. Thank God, this adventure is free for everybody, rich or poor, wise or ignorant, famous or unknown, with a good past or a bad--'Whosoever will, may come.' The greatest thing in the world is for everybody!" (Loc 704)
Dallas Willard writes also of this new world in the prelude to his book Renovation of the Heart: "When we open ourselves to the writings of the New Testament, when we absorb our minds and hearts in one of the Gospels, for example, or in letters such as Ephesians or 1 Peter, the overwhelming impression that comes upon us is that we are looking into another world and another life."(italics mine)
"It is a divine world and a divine life. It is life in the 'kingdom of the heavens.' Yet is a world and a life that ordinary people have entered and are entering even now. It is a world that seems open to us and beckons us to enter. We feel its call.
"The amazing promises to those who give their life to this new world through their confidence in Jesus leap out at us from the page.
"For example, we read Jesus' own words, that those who give themselves to him will receive a 'living water,' the Spirit of God Himself, that will keep them from ever again being thirsty -- being driven and ruled by unsatisfied desires -- and that this 'water' will become a well or spring of such water 'gushing up to eternal life' (John 4:14, PAR). Indeed, it will even become 'rivers of living water' flowing from the center of the believer's life to a thirsty world (John 7:38)" (p 9, loc 135).
A new world open to all, but few of us walk through that door. How strange as I wrote that last sentence I thought of a Kafka parable "Before the Law." Glancing at the story now (after many years have past since I first read it), I see that it is a longer and more complex story than my memory recalled. Without a closer look, I'm still going to write that it occurs to me that many of us stay out of this new world because of doorkeepers in our minds. For Laubach's friends, turning one's mind toward God one second of every minute of the day simply could not be done. According to Willard, we read the Gospels and the doorkeepers tell us "that the life [we] see there is so unlike what [we] know from [our] own experience" that we "neglect," "avoid," and/or "fail to immerse" ourselves in the words of Jesus.
What if, one by one, we start living as the free women and men of God that we are, and we take steps to walk through that door? Doorkeepers are employees of one with a greater authority. Doorkeepers must stand aside and let the residents enter. The One in authority has invited us into His kingdom. Why are we standing outside?
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