What do you do when all that you know and have known comes to an end? What do you do when the golden story that you’ve lived for years all of a sudden starts to decay? It breaks down, often times without your permission. The chess board that you are a piece on slowly starts to break down. All of the players that you’ve known don’t seem to perform their tasks as well as they used to; they have a light layer of grime that covers them, making them dirtier than their original state. You begin to see the players differently. For one, you focus on the layer of grime smeared on them. You see their impurities and problems and struggles and fears. It paints an awful mud on a once pure-white canvas. You’ve seen those players in what seems to you as a golden light, but now, that perfect aura is gone and you begin to see defects that you’ve never noticed before. As a fellow player, you’re driven nuts by the problems that you see. So badly you want to try and fix what is wrong. So badly you just want to get rid of that dirt that you see; but sometimes it seems like the dirt is permanently there and it seems like leaving that piece is the only way to evade the newfound dirt. However, sometimes we just have to work at the dirt until it goes away. We have to be patient, and accept that sometimes the dirt has always been there, it’s just that we were too blind to see it. Other times we figure out that we slowly watched the dirt get there. Regardless, we have to deal with the dirt the story has given us.

There is a second part to this equation as well. Often times the part of this analogy that we forget is that we too have a layer of grime over ourselves. Sometimes we forget to look in the mirror and realize that our grime might be causing strife in other players just as their grime has caused strife in us. Worse still is the possibility that our own grime has been spread over our eyes and affected how we see all of the other players. We see everything through that nasty, dirty layer causing everything we see to be distorted.

The victory in the story is that there is one who watches over the players on the board. The one who watches us has the ability to clean us and the players around us. The one who watches us can keep us from getting dirt onto ourselves. The one who watches us can lead us across the board to stay out of dirt and to lead others away from the dirt. All we have to do is simply ask that he do this.