1500 Pages

I’d preordered it months before it came out, and through a bit of luck and a lot of refreshing my inbox, I got early access. When the pdf’s came, I realized I was going to be the first person in Arizona to run a table for this game. I was giddy about it. I’m most definitely not too proud to say that.

The core rulebooks were no joke.

Between them they ran well over 1500 pages, enough paper to prop open a door in a high wind. And I had a full table. A very full table: 15 players, which in tabletop terms is less a gaming group than a small war council. They were as excited as I was. Most of them had never played anything like it before, and several said from the start that they were hoping for a long campaign, the sort that runs for years and becomes part of everyone’s life.

So I gave it everything I had.

Every spare hour went to it. I read late into the night and on my lunch breaks. I learned the system until I could explain its quirks without checking the index. I wrote the story, built the world, made visuals, and planned the opening scenes down to what each room would smell like. More than once I skipped the gym to study, which anyone who knows me will recognize as a serious sacrifice. I wanted to be ready. As ready as anyone could be with a brand-new system and 15 eager people waiting on me.

We played a couple of sessions. They were wonderful. Loud, funny, chaotic in the best way.

And then God told me to stop.

Nothing about the game was wrong.

I want to be clear about that, because I’ve had to be clear about it with myself. It wasn’t sinful. It wasn’t a distraction from something holier. It was good, and it was bringing people together. But I sensed, plainly and persistently, that my effort belonged somewhere else. A different community. A different table, so to speak.

I told my players right away. I didn’t want to string them along, and I didn’t want them building characters and backstories for a story that wasn’t going to be told. I could feel their disappointment through every written message. They’d wanted to go the distance. Now, in a single announcement, the whole thing was gone.

And all my preparation was gone with it.

Part of me looks back and thinks: what a waste.

So much reading. Weeks of evenings. Workouts I skipped. Art I made. A world I built for people who will now never walk through it. I keep doing the math on the hours, and the number makes me wince.

What stings most is the timing. If God had told me before I’d started, I could have spent all those hours on whatever He’s calling me toward now. I could have been preparing for the new thing instead of the one I had to lay down. Time is already the scarcest thing I have. I’ve written before about how much of my life feels rushed and how hard I work to protect what little margin there is. To find out I’d poured so much of that margin into something God was about to close felt, honestly, unfair.

Why not earlier? Why let me get all the way into it before saying stop?

I’ve written about how wary I am of “God told me,” how often those words turn out to be emotion or wishful thinking, and how important it is to have some way of testing what we think we’ve heard.

What I can say is this: The prompting didn’t come from wanting out. I wanted in. I was invested, and the game was going well. Nothing about stopping was convenient or beneficial to me, and in fact, it cost me something I valued. It didn’t contradict anything God has said in His Word, and it pointed toward serving people, not away from them. And I’ve walked with Him long enough to recognize the difference between my restlessness and His redirection, and this felt like the second.

Which leaves the harder question: Why the timing?

There’s a scene in the Gospels where the disciples ask almost exactly my question.

A few days before the crucifixion, a woman breaks open an alabaster flask of expensive ointment and pours it over Jesus’s head. The disciples are indignant. “Why this waste?” they ask. “For this could have been sold for a large sum and given to the poor” (Matthew 26:8-9).

They had a point, by the numbers. Mark says the ointment was worth more than 300 denarii, close to a year’s wages for a laborer (Mark 14:5). Poured out in a moment. Gone.

The Greek word for waste there is apōleia. It’s a strong word. Elsewhere in the New Testament it means destruction, ruin, even perdition. The disciples looked at that flask and saw something destroyed.

Jesus saw something else.

“Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a beautiful thing to me” (Matthew 26:10). He said that wherever the gospel was preached in the whole world, what she had done would be told in memory of her.

What the disciples called ruin, He called beautiful. Same act, same spilled ointment, two completely different measurements. And John tells a story that uses nearly the same word in a different way.

After Jesus feeds the five thousand, everyone eats until they’re full, and then He says to His disciples, “Gather up the leftover fragments, that nothing may be lost” (John 6:12). The verb for lost comes from the same root as apōleia. Nothing is to be destroyed. Nothing wasted.

They gathered 12 baskets of scraps.

I’ve always found that a strange detail. The Son of God has just multiplied bread out of almost nothing, and then He insists they pick up the crumbs. As if He cares about leftovers. As if the fragments of something already finished still have a use.

It makes me wonder what He intends to do with my fragments. 1,500 pages of rules I now know cold. A story I wrote. Visuals I made. The experience of keeping fifteen people engaged at one table. I don’t know that any of it is lost. I suspect it’s been gathered into a basket somewhere, and I simply haven’t seen where it’ll be set down.

David spent years preparing for a house he never got to build too.

He wanted to build a temple for the Lord, and God told him no. The house would be built, but by his son Solomon, not by him (1 Chronicles 22:7-10). David could have taken that as a closed door and walked away. Instead, he spent the rest of his life gathering materials for a building he would never see. Gold, silver, bronze, iron, timber, stone, “in great quantity” (22:14). He gathered craftsmen. He drew up the plans and handed them to Solomon, saying, “All this he made clear to me in writing from the hand of the LORD” (28:19).

Every bit of that preparation went into a building that bore another man’s name. David died before the foundation was laid.

I don’t think anyone reading Chronicles would call David’s work a waste. The temple stood because he prepared for it. His work wasn’t wasted; it was handed on.

I have no idea whether my preparation will be handed to someone else, or reused by me in some other form, or simply not remembered by anyone else. But David’s story keeps me from assuming that work I don’t get to finish is work that came to nothing.

Abraham, too, did all the preparing before God said stop.

God told him to take Isaac to Moriah, and Abraham rose early, split the wood, saddled the donkey, and traveled three days. He carried the fire and the knife. He built the altar and laid the wood in order. He bound his son. He raised the knife. And only then did the angel call out, “Do not lay your hand on the boy” (Genesis 22:12).

If I’m asking why God didn’t stop me sooner, Abraham could ask it a hundred times more pointedly. Why let him make the whole journey? Why the wood, the fire, the three days?

The angel gives part of an answer: “now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me” (22:12). The journey revealed something. Not to God, who already knew, but to Abraham, and to everyone who would read about it after.

And Abraham named the place YHWH yireh, usually translated “the LORD will provide.” The Hebrew verb, though, is ra’ah, to see. The Lord will see. He saw the three days. He saw every piece of wood Abraham split. None of it went unnoticed, even though the sacrifice itself never happened.

So what’s the lesson? I’m honestly still not sure.

Maybe it’s that obedience is its own fruit, or maybe it’s that I laid something down when asked. Maybe it’s that God measures by the offering, the way Jesus did with the alabaster flask, and not by whether my plans reach completion. Maybe it’s that some of what I learned will show up later, in a place I can’t yet see, the way David’s gold showed up in Solomon’s temple.

Or maybe the lesson is simply that I’m allowed to feel the sting and bring it to Him without pretending I’ve made peace with it. That seems fair too.

Paul ends his great chapter on the resurrection with a line I’ve been holding onto this week: “Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58). The word for in vain is kenos, empty. Labor done in the Lord isn’t empty, even when the project ends. Even when it ends after two sessions and 15 disappointed players.

The rulebooks are still on my shelf. Every time I walk past them I feel a small pang, and then I remember a woman with an empty flask and a teacher who told everyone to leave her alone because she’d done something beautiful.

I’m trying to believe that what I poured out was beautiful too, even though nobody got to see it finished.