My Daughter Thinks Horses Have Boundaries

I love chess. I want to establish that up front so you understand the scale of what happened here.

Chess is one of those rare games where nothing is left to luck. There are no dice. There are no cards. Everything that happens on that board is entirely up to you. If you win, you earned it. If you lose, well, you earned that too, and there is nobody to blame but yourself which is a real inconvenience for someone like me.

In most areas of life I have a healthy roster of scapegoats. Traffic. The economy. The children.

But chess strips all of that away and leaves you alone with your own decisions, which is either the most honest experience available to modern man or a form of self-punishment, depending on how the game went.

I am a decent player. Not great. Decent. I float somewhere between 1400 and 1500 Elo, which means nothing to most people, so let me translate. It means I am good enough to beat almost everyone I know personally and bad enough to be demolished by a twelve-year-old at any real tournament.

It is a strange middle ground. Too strong for the living room. Too weak for real competition. And the practical consequence is that nobody in my family wants to play me anymore. That is the curse of the hobby. You spend years getting better at something, and your reward is that you get to enjoy it alone.

So you can imagine what happened in my heart when my seven-year-old daughter walked up and asked me to teach her how to play.

This is the moment every chess-playing father dreams of.

In the back of my mind, she already has her norms, her WGM title, and it all starts here.

We started well. I want that on the record, because everything after this paragraph is a disaster.

She knew, without me telling her, exactly where the pieces went on the board. We started with pawns. Easy enough. Up to two squares on the first move, then one after that. They capture diagonally, and sometimes, on rare occasions, they capture diagonally without ending up on the square where the opposing pawn was. (En passant, for you chess nerds.)

Then I tried to explain how a knight moves.

The knight moves in the shape of an L. Two squares in one direction, then one square to the side. It also jumps over other pieces, which makes it the only piece on the board with absolutely no respect for personal boundaries.

And here is the part that matters for our story.

It can do all of this in any direction.

Forward.

Sideways.

Backwards.

And that was the issue.

Backwards.

She could not see it. I do not mean she disagreed with it. I mean she literally could not perceive it. As far as she was concerned, a knight moving backwards was against the laws of God and nature.

I showed her. I demonstrated. I moved the knight backwards myself.

"Two squares down... one square over..."

She watched me do it. She nodded.

Then I asked her to do it, and she moved the knight forward again, like the last ninety seconds had been a dream.

This is the part where my chess background became a liability, because I know how knights are supposed to be taught. I put a lone knight on an empty board and asked her to touch every square it could reach. She found every single one of them except the ones behind it.

Every.

Single.

Time.

It was as though the back half of the board was classified information. In her mind, the horse only knew one direction, and no amount of fatherly instruction could help her see otherwise.

And here is the thing that really got me.

A knight's move looks like a seven.

Two squares up. One square over.

Look at it on the board. It is a seven, plain as day.

She is seven.

Her entire existence is currently a diagram of this move.

I pointed this out with great enthusiasm, certain I had finally found the key. This was the illustration that would unlock everything.

"CHILD, the knight moves like the number seven... and you're seven! Isn't that cool?"

She looked at me with a face that contained no anger and no argument only the quiet certainty that the man speaking had completely lost his marbles.

Her remark was,

“But you said it was an L”

Fair point.

We ended the lesson on good terms. She thanked me, hugged me, and announced that chess was fun and she could not wait until we played again.

Somewhere around the ninth drill, while I was saying, "It can go backwards," for what may have been the fortieth time, it occurred to me that I know this feeling from the other side of the board.

There are things in Scripture. Simple things. Things God has demonstrated, illustrated, and repeated in both Scripture and life.

Forgive that person.

"And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you" (Ephesians 4:32).

Stop worrying about that thing.

"Casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you" (1 Peter 5:7).

You are not in control of that and you never were.

"Trust in the LORD with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding" (Proverbs 3:5).

And I sit there nodding at every demonstration, seeing every square on the board except the ones He is pointing at, absolutely certain that some moves are simply not available to a piece like me.

Moving seemingly backwards is the one we struggle with most.

Repentance, when you get down to it, can feel just like a backwards move. Admitting you were wrong. Retracing a step. Every other move in life feels natural. But backwards feels illegal, as though it must be against the rules, as though the piece simply cannot go there.

God said it plainly through Isaiah:

"In returning and rest you shall be saved; In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.' But you would not" (Isaiah 30:15).

"But you would not."

That is the whole thing, is it not?

And the Teacher keeps sliding the piece backward across the board, slowly, patiently, saying, "See, it is allowed. It has always been allowed," while we squint at the board and insist that cannot be right.

He is not frustrated by the ninth drill. He runs the tenth. He is "longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9).

I would like to tell you I bring that same patience to the kitchen table.

But I was audibly sighing by drill six, and my daughter is a child learning a game not a grown man refusing to forgive his neighbor.

This is the same girl who beats me at Candy Land. A game with zero skill, zero strategy, and total, absolute luck. She drew the right cards, I drew the wrong ones, and she celebrated like she had won the FIDE World Championship.

Twenty-five years of chess, and my legacy in this house is losing a card-flipping contest to a person who thinks horses cannot walk backwards.

There is probably a lesson in that too, but I have reached my quota for the evening.

The knight can move backwards.

I will die on this hill.

Love you dearly,

Jacob