Clearing the Tiles: Mahjong solitaire and everyday anxieties

Screenshot: Vita Mahjong app.

Almost every night before turning out the light, I wind down with a game of Mahjong solitaire on my phone. If you have ever played it, you know how messy that opening board looks. You are staring at a thick, layered stack of tiles, all jumbled together.

Most of them are locked in place, trapped underneath other pieces or hemmed in on both sides. You cannot just swipe your hand across the screen and clear it all in one go. You have to look closely, find two open matches on the edges, and tap them away.

Looking back on this past year, my life has felt a lot like that Mahjong pile.

When hard times, stress, and everyday responsibilities pile up on top of each other, it gets overwhelming fast. You look at the whole situation and it just feels like too much.

You want an easy fix to sweep the problems away, but life rarely works like that. Everything seems connected, and half the things you need to deal with are buried under something else.

The only way through the game is the exact same way through a rough year. You just take it one small piece at a time.

You find one little thing you can actually do today, a single pair you can match, and you remove it. It does not solve everything right away, but it frees up the tile underneath. Then you find another match, and another.

You have to be thoughtful about it and take your time. Before you know it, an entire corner of the board opens up. A whole side clears out. Slowly but surely, the mess starts to disappear.

That steady, day-by-day effort is something Scripture talks about all the time. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus puts it plainly when talking about worry, "So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today" (Matthew 6:34, NRSVUE).

Trying to carry the whole stack of tomorrow's problems while you are still dealing with today only burns you out. God does not ask us to fix our entire life all at once. We just have to handle the piece that is right in front of us.

There are always moments in the game where the board feels completely stuck, and you wonder if you made a wrong turn. But as Paul wrote in Galatians, "So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at proper time, if we do not give up" (Galatians 6:9, NRSVUE).

It takes patience to keep picking away at things when the progress feels slow.

Eventually, though, you tap that very last pair, and the screen clears completely. The big, messy pile that felt impossible at the start is gone. It did not take a miracle move, just a little patience, a little trust, and the willingness to keep going one tile at a time.

As Dolly Parton once put it, "If you don't like the road you're walking, start paving another one." Sometimes that paving happens one single stone, or one single tile, at a time.