"Its All In The Game"

As the old song says, "Many a tear will have to fall, but it’s all in the game."  The only real question is which game is being played. In chapter thirty-three in the book of Genesis, Jacob is playing a very odd, but familiar game. His game was called How Do I Save My Butt.  I told you it was familiar. 

The problem here is not the desire to preserve self, but how he went about doing it.  Like many of us, Jacob was willing put everything he had on the line to try and save himself from the perceived wrath of his twin brother Esau.  He set his goods, his servants, even his children and his wives – that’s right he had two of them, but remember I never said he was smart. 

Like a whirlpool in his thoughts, each revolution in his plans took him deeper and deeper into darkness. Each layer, a well planned step by Jacob, took him further away from God and right into an urban mess.

Anyway, Jacob was heading back home when he was confronted by his brother and almost pee’ed his pants or his burqa it would have been called in that day. And this even after Esau had shown that he meant his brother no evil, but greeted him with tears of the joy of reunification.  

So, while Esau was planning the big family reunion, Jacob was lying his tail off and headed east as his brother rode north. When we allow ourselves to give into the domination of fear, rational thinking is the first thing to go. So instead of going back to his ancestral home with its extended family and the security of numbers, Jacob fled to Shechem in Canaan to live in tents outside the city wall. [BTW: This is where his daughter Diane was raped.]

So as creators of Urban Fiction, we can follow the dark twist and turns found in the corridors of the human experience to draw upon for the seeds of our story lines.  It is true that truth is stranger than fiction and it is also true that our life experiences give us all we need to create.  So go Urban and stop just talking about writing and write.