What you can learn from Wii®din

We just bought the new Nintendo game Wii® on Saturday and boy, is it a hoot! How many of you have Wii®? For those of you scratching your head and wondering what the heck is Weedin talking about, let me explain. Wii® is basically a PlayStation ® console where you can play video games on your TV. It’s a wireless game that needs YOU to do all the motions in order to make the characters on your TV move. So, if you’re playing golf, tennis, baseball, boxing, or racing cows – you perform all the actions. No more sitting like a lump on a chair with a joy stick, now you have to get up and move with Wii®.

First of all, as a family Wii® provided us hours of fun, raucous laughter at each others follies, and (unbelievably) great exercise. We were all pooped at the end of the evening. If you don’t believe me, go try out the boxing trainer and tell me you don’t work up a real sweat.

So, what can we learn from playing Wii®?

Ironically, the Gospel on Sunday was about humility. My daughter Kelli and I were competing in several games, namely boxing and shooting (not people – mainly space ships coming to take away little characters that look like us). She was regularly beating me (pretty soundly) in all the games that required speed, reflexes, and agility. It’s a humbling thing to be beaten by your 17 year old daughter in a boxing match! Although I was stronger (measured by the speed of your punch), she was quicker, delivering more blows.

The lesson in humility dovetailed beautifully with the Gospel reading. One of the areas of work I need is in humility and sometimes my kids give me a wake up call. Do you think God does that to us? Whenever we start to get a little big for our britches, maybe God gives us a little piece of humble pie (in my case a game of Wii®) to bring us back down to earth. What was the last dose of humility you received? Maybe the more important question is - what did you do with it?

Dan

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