There’s a scene in the TV show The Wire that is pretty well known that I particularly love — the “chess scene.” Two young men are playing a board game that you can recognize are chess pieces. An older guy comes by and explains that the last move was wrong, because a knight moves in an L. But instead it only moved one space diagonally. The young men explain they are playing checkers, but all they have are chess pieces. Sometimes the game you want to play isn’t the game you have. (That’s a deep cut insight on the Wire, incidentally, in case you are a fan!)

That scene always makes me think about using things outside of their rules, especially with games and toys. Games are often designed to be won and puzzles are often designed to be solved. Take a Rubik’s cube as an example. Chaos is supposed to be solved into uniformity. All one color on each side is a solved Rubik’s cube.

But who says uniformity is good? Who says a Rubik’s cube needs to be solved? The image above is an example. The mosaic above is all Rubik’s cubes. None of them are “solved” per se, even if some of them are all one color on each side. Instead, they are changed, reshaped, shifted into something else. And that is as good a use of a Rubik’s cube as there is.

Change is inevitable. But not all change progresses toward perfection, or “ought-ness.” Sometimes change is just beautiful.

Sometimes it is hard to tap into our spiritual selves or find time to nurture our creativity and intellectual curiosity. Here is a section that reflects on some nourishing materials from around the web and related media channels in order to get us thinking, get us feeling, and get us reflecting on the lives we are living in this big world. **Some Adult/Mature Themes May Appear in Links and Other Attached Material**

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Allan T. Georgia, MDiv, MTS, PhD