I Played To Win Against A Seven Year Old

You beat him again on Sunday and felt absolutely nothing.

That is the part that has been sitting with you. Not guilt exactly. Just a complete absence of anything at all, which is a strange result from a thing you did on purpose.

And there is a question underneath it that you have not been able to shake: what exactly is being proved here, and who is it for.

Because it is not for him. He is seven. And it is not for you, or there would be something in it, and there is nothing.

You did not arrive at this deliberately. It came out of a decent principle, which is that you do not want to be a man who patronizes his own children, and that principle is right.

The trouble is that you have been applying it with one setting: full.

And full strength against a seven year old is not honesty. It is a different mistake with a better reputation than letting him win, and it produces about the same result.

Iron sharpeneth iron

There is a proverb about two men and it is usually read as being about friendship. Read the physics of it instead.

Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend. (Proverbs 27:17, King James Version)

Iron sharpens iron. Both objects are iron. That is the condition under which sharpening happens.

Iron against soft metal does not sharpen it. It marks it, bends it, flattens it. The result is not a sharper thing, it is a damaged thing, and the iron is unchanged.

You are a man who can sharpen without flattening, and playing properly has never once meant playing at full strength against a child. Proverbs 27:17 makes the matching of the two objects the condition of the sharpening, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can put that in front of a man as physics rather than as a rebuke.

And notice what gets sharpened. The countenance of his friend.

Not his skill. His face. The proverb is describing something that happens to a person, which is that they come alive against something they can meet.

You have been trying to sharpen with something that cannot be met, and a contest a child cannot reach has never once produced anything in him. The Spirit of God is the one who explains a mechanism rather than assigning a fault, and it is written in Proverbs 27 that both objects in that image are the same material.

So the question is not whether to play honestly. It is what the honest version of a match between a man and a seven year old actually looks like.

You are able to make a real contest at a table, and a match somebody can win has never once been a match that was rigged. It is written that iron sharpeneth iron, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man the difference between a handicap and a lie.

The difference between a handicap and a lie

Now the distinction that unlocks this, and it is the whole article.

Letting him win is a lie. You make a move you would not make and pretend it was your best. That is what he spotted last spring and it is why it landed badly.

Playing at his level is a handicap. It is announced, it is understood, and everything inside it is honest.

You have a way to make it fair without making it false, and a stated handicap has never once been the same object as an engineered mistake. The Spirit of God is the one who separates two things a man has been treating as one, and Proverbs 27:17 puts the sharpening in a matched contest.

And the announcing is what makes the difference. It has to be out loud.

I will play with one hand. I will not use that. I will give you a head start of four. Anything, as long as it is said before you start and everybody knows it.

You are able to say the terms out loud, and a handicap declared before a game has never once been condescension. It is written in Proverbs 27 that the sharpening happens between things that can meet, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a man to state a fair arrangement plainly.

And here is why he will take it well, which will surprise you.

A stated handicap tells a seven year old that he is worth arranging a real contest for. A father who quietly plays badly tells him nothing, and a father who plays full strength tells him he is not in the contest at all.

You have something to give that dignifies him, and terms said out loud have never once been a smaller compliment than a fair fight. The Spirit of God is the one who is present when a man says the arrangement plainly, and Scripture makes the matching of the two objects the whole condition.

Say it out loud before you start

Here is the instruction and the saying is the instruction.

Play at the level he can reach tonight, say the terms out loud, and let him hear them before anything starts.

Before anything starts. Plainly, in an ordinary voice, with no apology in it.

You are able to set fair terms without pretending anything, and a spoken arrangement has never once been a way of going easy on somebody. The Holy Spirit is the one at work in something agreed openly, and Proverbs 27:17 has both pieces of iron acknowledged as iron.

And then, inside those terms, play properly.

That is the second half and it is what makes the whole thing real. Once the handicap is set, everything inside it is at full effort. No further softening, no engineered mistakes, no letting anything through.

You have permission to try hard inside a fair arrangement, and full effort inside stated terms has never once been unkind. The Spirit of God is the one who lets a man play properly with a clear conscience, and it is written that the sharpening is what happens between two things that can meet.

And adjust the handicap as he grows, out loud, each time.

You are able to keep this honest for years by saying it every time, and terms that changed as somebody got better have never once been terms that insulted them. It is written in Proverbs 27 that the sharpening produces something in the countenance, and the Spirit of God is the one at work at a table where the arrangement was named.