Today is National Trivia Day.

About 20 years ago two friends got into a friendly argument over who was the better game player. In order to settle the argument fairly the two created their own board game based on answering a series of, well, trivial questions. Eventually they decided they had a moneymaking idea, and the Trivial Pursuit® game was born. At first the game received a less than enthusiastic reception, selling only a few hundred copies when it debuted in 1982. But by 1984, word of mouth took over, and in that year alone, 20 million games were sold. There are now more than a half dozen spin-offs on this popular game, including Trivial Pursuit® Junior.

Trivia has become a national past time. There are websites devoted to trivia of every imaginable sort—movies, books, sports, celebrities, food, animals. There are even books and games devoted to Bible trivia. Considering that trivia often has to do with unimportant, obscure facts, do you ever wonder why we are so obsessed with it?

Well, it is fun. And there’s that certain sense of personal satisfaction when you are the only one who knows which birds have been trained to tend sheep, or what the biggest selling restaurant food happens to be (OK, the answers are geese and French fries). Still, Jesus reminds us that only one thing is truly important—and that’s to make God’s concerns our number one priority. When we fill our minds with God’s thoughts, his desires, and the concerns of his heart, everything else becomes, well, trivial.

He will give you all you need from day to day if you live for him and make the Kingdom of God your primary concern (Matthew 6:33).

To Do

Create a trivia test based on facts about you. Give it to your best friend or a family member. After sharing the answers, make sure to tell that person about the one thing that is truly most important.

Also on this day . . .

1850—The first American ice-skating club was formed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

1896—Utah became America’s 45^th state.

From Betsy Schmitt and Dave Veerman, 365 Trivia Twist Devotions: An Almanac of Fun Facts and Spiritual Truth for Every Day of the Year (Cincinnati: Standard, 2005). Scripture quotations are from the New Living Translation unless otherwise noted.