The Blame Game

March 14, 2023

This game is one I was really good at.

Practice makes perfect you know.

Exercising my skills strengthened my resolve. I became tactically and strategically adept playing the Blame Game.

In the 1960’s, my blaming focus was the Viet Nam War. As an adolescent I blamed my parents, school administrators and even teachers, guidance counselors, and the like, who had no real guidance for me. My problems were the responsibility of governments, Church, God… oh! especially God, since He was supposed to be in charge of everything… where was He anyhow?!? I was taught that He was the Great Problem Solver in the Sky.

The world is evidently a self-perpetuating mess who’s ideas to fix things simply give us just ever more things to complain about. That’s our most powerful weapon in the Blame Game: complaining… Because what we are really doing is blaming others for our sometimes imaginary problems, sometimes uneducated to the facts. Sometimes we complain just as a matter of habit, sometimes we are even correct that something is wrong, but we have no workable solution to the problem and we blame others because they don’t have an immediate solution either!

It took me a long, long time to get over myself, and isn’t that one of the key requisites of the Blame Game? Being overly self involved, turned in on oneself?

I use to travel across country a lot, hitchhiking back and forth between the Coasts, and had lots of time between rides to contemplate the Universe. Well, truth is I spent little time contemplating and most of my idle time yelling my complaints to God. God had become my focus of blame. Instead of zapping me out of existence, he patiently led me along.

There was a situation where I had a horrible reaction to the hallucinogen LSD where I called on God to save me, and He did. One second, I was falling into oblivion and the next second, I was in a place of calmness and cool breezes.

Continuing on my travels, I caught a ride with a young married couple, hippie types, and they brought me to a place where I could eat and sleep under a roof, on a bed. It was far better than sleeping under a highway overpass. Turned out to have other young people like myself who had been rescued from their wayward journeys by God. But there was something more to them. They had taken responsibility for their own actions that had been messing up their own lives, and they had turned to Jesus who gave them new life.

I finally joined them in taking responsibility for my own life’s messes, and asked Jesus to forgive me and come into my life. He did.

I was out of my addiction to the Blame Game. Oh, I still had a lot to learn about life with Jesus and life in general. I still make mistakes, but Jesus is there to forgive and forget, to help and to correct, to expose hurts and to heal them and remove the scars.

Now, you don’t have to look very hard or far to see the millions of people playing the Blame Game- on the News, on the Internet, or perhaps, even in a mirror. Maybe you will realize that the Blame Game is a fruitless endeavor and a complete waste of time… it perpetuates real harm and deep hurt.

Stop it.

God actually is the Great Problem Solver in the Sky. The key is to call on Him and above all LISTEN! Like most of us, Jesus is not going to answer the door for unserious visitors, salesmen, spammers or trollers, thieves and the like. Get serious or get off His lawn.