When I was a kid my dad always had job lists for us. Sometimes they were permanent lists of jobs that constantly needed doing. Sometimes he would make a list for just that one Saturday. While I didn't love the chores, I didn't really object to the list method of doling them out. What I objected to, was the no list method. The method where my dad would say, "I need the house cleaned up today," so you would get started with what you thought that meant. Then, usually just as you thought you were about done, there would me more to the job than you realized. Argh!

While I'm sure there are things that I do, that my parents did, that I swore I never would, the not list method of chore assigning is not one of them. There are a lot of variations on the list method at my house because I'm easily bored, oh, and because kids grow and change. I've blogged about one of my game list methods before. Today I tried a new method. I was hoping for some of those other life lessons that you learn along the way.

"Alright," I said to Rachel and JD, "Here are your strips. JD, these are for you. You can put them in any order you want or draw them at random. I don't care. Rachel, these are for you and Abby to figure out who does what. Except one. One of those is for JD. You two go negotiate and decide who gets what."

They seemed excited as they ran off to the basement to discuss without my interference.

Yeah. That didn't last long.

"Mom!" JD came racing back upstairs.

"Mom! JD is ruining everything!" Rachel's screeched from the basement, accompanied by foot stomping.

"JD, are you ruining everything?"

"No, she just wants me to draw my job out at random, and I don't want to do that."

Rachel flopped into a kitchen chair, tears in her eyes. "That's what's fair Mom!"

"You want the whole thing to be a drawing?"

"Yes. That's the only fair way."

And that's when I realized that there's "fair" and "nobody's fault," and those are not necessarily the same thing. If they drew out the jobs, somebody could get stuck with all the big jobs and somebody else could get all the little jobs. All that would be accomplished would be that the lucky people would get to shrug their shoulders and say, "It's not my fault! It just worked out that way." It wouldn't make the injustice any easier to bear for the unlucky kid.

A person can get a bad draw in life and it's nobody's fault. But that in no way makes it fair. People can get a great draw in life and it's to nobody's credit, and that's not fair either, but most of the time we don't mind when it works out well.

The problem is though, that we act like life is fair. We say that it's not. We quote The Princess Bride and all, but we live like it is fair. We live like, and we treat people like, life is fair, that people get what they've earned. If people need help, it's because they're "front porch sitting, lazy, crack heads." If they have a college education and a great middle class job, it's because they worked hard and made good choices.

That's not exclusively true. To quote The Newsboys this time, "When you get what you don't deserve, it's a real good thing. When you don't get what you deserve, it's a real good thing." Sometimes life is random. To get to my "successful" life, (or at least I see it as successful) I've had a lot of help. The people who have poured good things into my life is longer than a blog post (even one of mine) and the number of stupid things that I've done that I didn't have to suffer the full consequences for is equally long.

Life is not fair. It requires living in grace and peace.