Gaming the System

Today's devotional on creativity is from Life Is A Goldmine: Can You Dig It?

"The angel of the Lord came and sat down under the oak in Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from the Midianites" – Judges 6:11.

The Midianites were oppressing the Israelites, confiscating their goods and ravaging their land. A man named Gideon came up with a plan to circumvent the problem by threshing wheat where no one would think to look for him—in a winepress. When there are rules or regulations in place, people often exercise magnificent creativity to avoid or beat the system that is in place.

There is a phrase for that, and it's "gaming the system," which when defined means "manipulation or exploitation of the rules designed to govern a given system in an attempt to gain an advantage over other users." This can also be a response to legalism, for when there are rigid rules, people creatively examine how little they can do to follow the rules with no intention of complying altogether.

Are you devoting the best of your creativity to devising plans on how to do as little as possible and gain maximum returns? Are you looking for loopholes you can exploit and turn to your advantage? Have you given up on changing the status quo so you creatively try to make the most of a bad situation?

Lord, I don't want to deploy my creativity to devise ways that I can invest as little of myself as possible and get a large return. I want to use it to advance Your kingdom and express Your goodness toward me and my family. In other words, I don't want to use my creativity only in ways that will benefit me but will benefit as many as possible. And I don't want to get so used to a bad situation that all I do is look for ways to work around it.