Easter Sunday afternoon leisurely spills into evening. We eat, talk, drink coffee, eat more, talk more… and play a game, a Bible trivia game, for ages 10 and up. (Good thing we didn’t play the age 30 and up version, he he).  Seven adults, seven kids. Four kids break off to play the Wii. My 13 year old girl joins the trivia game, while an 18 month old sweetie-pie, with the cutest  curls you ever saw, succumbs to sleep. We decide to play men vs. women, except for a precocious little 4 year old girl who wants to defect to the other side, and the guys let her– so we lose one to the opponent’s team. Oh well.

Some of the trivia questions are fairly easy, such as,“Who killed Goliath with a stone?”, while other questions were a bit more obscure, like “What was the name of Agrippa’s female companion?” (Are you kidding me? Nobody has a clue. The answer is “Bernice”.) When we find obviously easy questions we skip them and go on to harder ones, like the one I decide to ask the guys when it is my turn.

Just the question itself makes me laugh.

“Who were Uz and Buz?”

“What? Who? Could you repeat that?”

Sure. I repeat. I spell. To be kind and fair and cover all possible ground, I even pronounce the names two ways, just incase, first with a short “u” vowel sound, which sounds like this: “uzz” and “buzz”, and then with a long “u” vowel sound, which sounds like this: “ooze” and “booze”.

There you go. Uzz and Buzz or Ooze and Booze. Take your pick. Uz and Buz would make excellent names for a Veggie Tales cartoon, don’t you think? (If the answer to this question is obvious to anyone out there, I must add that no one in this group was a Bible scholar or trivia expert.)

This turns out to be a hard question. We can’t just give out questions with easy answers;  this is, after all, a game for anyone age 10 and older. And since we are … a bit older than that, we’ve got to ask the tough questions.

While we allow the men’s team ample time to think and discuss possible answers, I’m thinking this: I know I have read this passage before, and those names did not stop me whatsoever in my reading at that time. But seeing these names paired together for a Bible trivia question makes for a hilarious question, and I’m less likely to forget them now.

…And it makes me wonder how I’m looking at things, how much I’m skimming, how I can see the whole piece of something but easily miss the individual parts, or inversely, see the pieces but not the whole. And shouldn’t I see both, for a balanced view?

…And this is how God sees, He sees the whole and the parts, and makes it all fit.

…And how much of the Bible there is to “see”, and how I know I’ll miss things like Uz and Buz again.

…And how God is in these moments that make up the whole.

…And how God must laugh. And I imagine that it was His laugh that makes the daffodils bloom in my yard on Easter morning, and the birds I hear are singing in response to His morning call.

…And how He is taking joy in the moments that His children spend together playing games and eating meals and laughing.

…And how His love is so big to give us the gift of life through a horrible death, and how it is His joy to offer us a way back to Him.

All these things. And today, how I’m laughing because of Uz and Buz, and aren’t those two gloriously funny words, paired together like that?

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The other team didn’t know the answer to that trivia question. Despite this, they still won. But just barely.

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(p.s. Do you want to know the answer?  Here’s a clue: Genesis 22:21, NIV. You didn’t think I’d just tell you the answer now, did you? 🙂 )

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Sharing this playdate with Laura at The Wellspring: