Tetris is one of the earliest video games ever made. If you haven’t played it, you certainly know about it. A series of blocks tumbles from the top of a vertical rectangle, and the player shifts the shapes around so they fall into place, creating lines that disappear when they are completed. Your goal is to keep the rectangle area from filling up with blocks. And it gets faster after every few lines completed.

An amazing thing happened in Tetris this week: a 13 year old boy from Oklahoma beat Tetris. Ostensibly, there’s no way to beat Tetris. It just keeps getting harder and harder. Eventually, everyone is just supposed to lose. But this kid––Willis Gibson is his name––beat it by getting to such a high level, the game “broke,” glitching in a way where everything froze and the player couldn’t continue. What’s called the “Kill Screen” by video game enthusiasts.

What’s amazing is that this is part of a larger story of collaboration and community around players who showcased their ingenuity and shared their vision with one another to get to a point where a 13 year old could beat Tetris. It involved find whole new ways to play the game, including a new way to even hold the controller. It involved others getting very far into the game to know it was possible. It involved community forums and video bloggers sharing their experiences. You can watch an amazing story about all of this here:

This month we are talking about heritages and about ways forward. And to me, this story captures how we create the future we can imagine by drawing on the best that the past has to offer. We should imagine the things we can do, how we can break old ideas and push forward in new ways. We also can internalize how the past gives us tools to imagine new ways forward. Learning how someone else broke an old idea can be an important part of our story––even if the new idea they offered doesn’t serve us any longer.

Consider the amazing things that we can do when we embrace the profound things in our past in order to imagine the future in new ways! Who knows how far we could get!

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

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