Rule No. 30: REMEMBER WHOSE GAME THIS IS

The moment you stop gripping the game and remember whose hands it was always in.

Hello, Dear Reader,

Welcome back to the final week in The Playbook: Rules for Life. What a journey it has been. We have experienced so much together over these thirty rules. I have shared my life and my journey, and I have been continuously blessed and honored by the way you have responded to each one. I am grateful for every chance I have had to deposit something into the bank account of your soul.

By the time your eyes land on these words, we will be hours away from the edge of something: a year, a season, a chapter, a journey. Maybe you are looking back at the last twelve months feeling grateful. Maybe you are exhausted and cannot wait for the clock to strike twelve and for the ball to drop in Times Square so a new year can begin. Maybe you are somewhere in the middle, carrying both relief and regret cupped in the same pair of hands. Maybe you are praying on bended knees for 2026 to be the year of change, and I stand with you.

Wherever you are, I pray for two things:

That you would have the courage to tell the truth about the season you just walked through, and the humility to place that season, the wins, the losses, the almosts, and the not-yets, back into God’s hands.

Because that is where Rule 30 lives.

In Rule 29, I wrote about leaving the jersey better than you found it: legacy, stewardship, and building beyond yourself so that others can run where you learned to walk. That rule has been a driving force in everything I have done since I left Guyana, now twenty-four days away from nine years ago. Now, in Rule 30, the question goes deeper:

What happens when you finally admit the jersey, the court, the breath in your lungs, and the time on the clock were never really yours to begin with?

Today, as I write this, winter’s wind is moving through the trees outside my window, causing leafless branches to sway. My apartment is quiet. Suki and Lucy lie in their beds, blissfully caught in whatever it is they dream about. There is no crowd here. No scoreboard. No visible audience for this final rule.

It is just me at my desk, a blinking cursor, and the dawning awareness that I have written my way through thirty rules across a year that stretched me beyond what I thought myself capable of holding. A year of wild growth despite the pain, the aching, the successes, the endings I never wanted, and the beginnings I never dreamed of.

Behind these thirty rules sit six poetry books, three of them written in a single month to close out a bildungsroman chronicling my life up to this point. There are years of classrooms, both as a student and as a teacher, including the appearances I made as a guest speaker in rooms where I once sat many moons ago at 8000 Utopia Parkway. There are games, some with buzzer beaters, some with blowouts, and some I did not survive in overtime. There are heartbreaks, hellos, and goodbyes, breakthroughs, and mostly prayers whispered silently as tears spilled like ink across blank pages while I sat in empty rooms. There are nights with smoke in my lungs, ice in my cup, and whiskey to try to cure insufferable loneliness.

Through it all, one truth continually rises to the surface, one I have always known but only in this year have I fully begun to understand:

None of this started with me.
None of this will end with me.

I am not the main character.
I am not the coach.
I am not even the owner of the court.

I am a player who has been entrusted with a jersey and a playbook, invited into a game that was in motion long before I ever laced my shoes or drew my first breath.

So that is where today’s rule lands:

RULE 30: REMEMBER WHOSE GAME THIS IS
You are responsible, but you are not in charge.

Even the tallest structures live within a light they did not create.

The Lesson

At the end of the year, we always sit and reflect. We spend time planning for the new year. We carry unfinished work over the threshold and stack new resolutions beside it. We have our vision boards and our New Year’s Eve parties, then we wake in the new year ready, or somewhat ready, to begin again.

I am in this period now, and even as the end of 2025 has revealed more about who I am in this moment, I cannot help but think about my life as a whole. In 2026, I will turn thirty, and as I reflect, I can admit that I have spent so much time believing perfection’s lie. The lie that told me if I could get the plays right and make the right decisions, I could control the outcome.

If I trained hard enough, studied long enough, wrote myself into bloodshot eyes and trembling hands, I believed I had done everything possible. If I anticipated every outcome, saw many moves ahead, and managed my emotions accordingly, then surely the results would match the effort. I was so headstrong that you could not tell me otherwise. I built walls to protect that belief. I pushed people away who could not understand why I was doing everything I was doing, then sat in the wake of the spaces they left and turned that criticism inward. I chuckle softly now when I think about that.

In truth, I built my internal world around the assumption that if you work hard, do right, honor God, even if you make mistakes, the scoreboard will eventually tilt in your favor. That belief did not feel wrong when the scoreboard did tilt. However, when it did not, I began to wonder why I was doing what I was doing.

There were seasons when I did all the “right” things and still watched doors close. Seasons where I carried myself with integrity and still found myself on the wrong end of injustice. Seasons where God felt quiet, not because I had walked away from Him, although sometimes I had, but because the story was moving in ways I did not understand. How do you explain that to someone who always has to understand?

I know the particular ache that comes when you realize you cannot coach your way out of everything. You cannot coach your way out of someone else’s free will. You cannot coach your way out of illness or grief. You cannot coach your way out of timing that pays no attention to your calendar. You cannot coach your way out of a God who refuses to be reduced to your limits.

Somewhere along the way, I realized this: I had started to treat my relationship with God like a franchise I was trying to manage on His behalf. As if He had handed me the keys to a court and said, “Go run this. I will check the results later.” As if the outcome of everything hinged on my performance, my discipline, my ability to hold it all together.

I will never forget telling God one time, “I got this. I know I need You, but I do not need You right now. I will find You again sometime, but still keep the lights running.” Maybe those were not my exact words, but the feeling was the same. Oh, the hubris. Time and time again, I realized I “got” nothing. I could not deliver myself in the midnight hour and certainly could not perform my way to grace.

If you look at Scripture, you will see that God is never just the sponsor. He is the Author and Finisher, the Alpha and Omega, the One who holds not just the ball but the breath in your body. Debbie constantly reminded me of this. She championed the truth that it is His sovereignty that sets the times and seasons. He is the One who opens and closes doors and orders steps you do not even know you are taking yet. She was and is right.

At some point, if you are honest, you will admit that you are playing in Someone else’s game.

The Final Rule

So here is the rule, plainly stated:

RULE 30: REMEMBER WHOSE GAME THIS IS

This does not mean you are not responsible for how you play. In fact, quite the opposite. You are responsible for how you play, but you are not sovereign over the court.

You have real agency, and your choices matter. Your obedience matters. Your character matters. You can foul, you can miss, you can pass, you can shoot. You can run the clock down. You can choose whether to follow the playbook or freelance your way into foolishness. I have certainly done the last part, then sat in the brokenness of my foolishness, wishing I could take it all back. But you cannot erase the last play. It remains.

However, you did not design the court. You did not write the physics of the ball. You did not breathe life into your lungs this morning. You did not script the existence of the very people you are trying to love, impress, or forgive. And thank God you did not, because if the world sat on your shoulders, the weight would crush you.

I know this all too well. I have many lines of poetry where I write about feeling like Atlas, carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. A self-imposed weight because I tried to take responsibility and ownership of what was not mine, and people who were not mine.

Remembering whose game this is does not erase responsibility. It rightly relocates it. It says:

• I am accountable for my effort, honesty, and obedience.

• God is responsible for outcomes, timing, and the unseen storylines I cannot control.

That distinction sounds simple on paper. Living it is another matter entirely. We are human, and in our humanness, we try to control outcomes, despite constant reminders that we cannot.

The Reflection

Faith leaves fingerprints long before it leaves recognition.

When I look back at these thirty rules, I see my fingerprints all over them. I see the essence of who I am pressed into every page. I have shared my stories, my metaphors, my scars, my laughter, my cats, my Guyanese heritage, my Queens apartment, my open windows, my gym sets, my classrooms, my church pews. I see the ways I have tried to hand you a playbook made from my own lived tapes. It has not just been the highlights or the social-media-worthy moments. It has been me.

Yet, if you tilt the page, expose it to blue light, you will see someone else’s fingerprints beneath mine. I did not hold myself through the nights I thought I would break. I did not write six poetry books in my own strength. I did not carry myself through the disappointments, the delays, the “no’s,” and the “not yet’s.” I did not architect the exact people who came into my life at the right time, or the exact phrases that cracked something open in my heart.

No.

I cooperated.
I wrestled.
I resisted.
I repented.
I messed up again.
I repented again.

Through it all, I kept writing.

But I did not architect this, and neither did you architect the totality of your own story. If you look at your own life, you have to admit a few things:

You did not choose the family you were born into. You did not decide the decade, the city, the culture, or the body you inhabit. You did not choose some of the wounds that have marked you. If you could have, you would not have allowed some of the things that happened to you to occur in the first place, even if they made you stronger or brought you closer to who you are meant to be.

Yet here you are: breathing, reading, carrying a mix of hope and tiredness into another day, another year.

The longer I live and the more I grow, the more suspicious I become of self-made narratives. The ones that say, “I got here because I hustled harder,” or “I am where I am purely because I was smarter, stronger, more disciplined.”

Discipline matters, and hustle has its place. But humility tells a truer story:

• Someone else prayed for you.

• Someone else opened a door.

• Someone else gave you language when you had none.

• Someone else carried you in worship when you could not sing for yourself.

• Someone else covered you in their intercession when your faith was thin, or even nonexistent.

And beyond all the someones, there is the One who knew your frame before you took your first breath. The One who knew you while you were still dust and unformed.

Remembering whose game this is will pull you in two directions at once:

• Downward into humility, because you are not the center.

• Upward into worship, because the One at the center is better than you imagined.

It will also quietly dismantle the lie that everything rests on you.

When everything feels as if it depends on your performance, you will either:

• live anxious, trying to grip tighter and tighter, or

• live exhausted, eventually collapsing under a weight you were never meant to carry.

Rule 30 invites you to open your hands.

You can still show up. You can still give your best. You can still honor God with your work, your relationships, your body, your money, and your time. You simply do not have to pretend you are the one keeping the universe in orbit while you do it.

What the Word Says

Scripture does not present God as a distant spectator, interested in the scoreboard but disconnected from the court. It presents Him as:

• The Vine: “Apart from Me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5)

• The Potter: shaping clay that does not always understand the form it is taking. (Isaiah 64:18)

• The Author and Finisher of our faith: the One who starts and completes the story of belief in us. (Hebrews 12:2)

• The One in whom we live and move and have our being: the environment of our existence, not a guest who occasionally drops by. (Acts 17:28)

Over and over again, Scripture pulls us back from self-worship and self-despair into something steadier: God as the center.

Not us or our talent. Not our trauma or our self-regulation. Not our success and certainly not our failure.

When you remember whose game this is:

• Your wins become testimonies, not trophies.

• Your losses become places of encounter, not evidence that God has abandoned you.

• Your delays become classrooms where trust is expanded, not proof that you are cursed.

• Your calling becomes worship, not a vehicle for your ego.

To forget whose game this is, is to start believing either that God is lucky to have you on His team or that God has forgotten you entirely.

Both are lies.

The truth is more grounded and more beautiful:

You were invited into a story you did not start, carried by a grace you did not earn. You are sustained by a Presence you cannot manufacture. You are called to play your position with courage, integrity, and joy. Then, when it is all over and the lights go out, you are called to lay the jersey down when your season ends, trusting that the game goes on in wiser hands than yours.

The Practice

So how do we live Rule 30 in a way that is practical and not just poetic? Here are a few places to begin, based on what I have learned, found, and listened to:

1) Name Where You Are Acting Like the Owner

Ask yourself, gently and honestly:

• Where am I moving as if everything depends on me?

• Where am I refusing to rest because I secretly believe God will not show up unless I grind myself into the ground?

• Where am I clenching my jaw, my schedule, my relationships, my image, as if letting go for a moment will cause everything to fall apart?

Write those places down. Name them. Clarity is the first act of surrender. Surrender is the second act in restoration, and restoration is the third act in becoming.

2) Give God Back What You Took

There are some things you quietly wrestled out of God’s hands: outcomes, timelines, payback, image management, control over how people see you. I will raise my hand as guilty here.

In this new year, take one of those areas and pray a dangerous, honest prayer:

“God, I have been trying to run this part of my life like it is mine. I have tried to coach, control, and choreograph the outcome. Today, I am giving this back to You. Show me what it looks like to be faithful without trying to be You.”

You cannot surrender what you will not admit you are holding.

3) Re-Anchor Your Metrics

When you forget whose game this is, your metrics warp.

Success becomes:

• “Did I get the applause?”

• “Did I look impressive?”

• “Did everything go according to my plan?”

Remembrance shifts the metrics to:

• “Did I obey?”

• “Did I love well?”

• “Did I tell the truth?”

• “Did I repent quickly when I missed the mark?”

• “Did I point back to God, not to myself?”

Choose one area of your life, your work, your art, your service, your relationships, and rewrite the scoreboard. Let obedience and integrity weigh more than visibility. Admittedly, this is a challenge, but believe me, Dear Reader, when I say it is worth it.

4) Practice Sabbath as Defiance

One of the most tangible ways to remember whose game this is, is to stop playing for a moment. You do not do this because the work is finished. You do not do this because your to-do list is empty. You do it because you are choosing to trust that God is God, even when you are not producing.

Sabbath is not laziness. Even God rested after six days of creation. Sabbath is a weekly declaration:

“I am not the one holding the universe together. I can stop, and the world will not end. God is God, and I am not.”

So pick a window of time. It can be an afternoon, an evening, or a full day if you can manage it, and step away from the grind. Put the phone down. Close the laptop. Use that time for rest, worship, and the simple joy of being a person, not a project. Enjoy the people you are blessed to have in your life. Walk outside. Feel the sun on your face. Stretch toward heaven and remember that growth happens even when you do not see anything happening.

5) End the Day by Returning the Whistle

At the end of the day, before you roll over to scroll or fall asleep, pause and pray:

“God, today I did what I could. I made some good decisions and some bad ones. I said some things I am proud of and some I wish I could take back. I offer You the whole of it, the made shots, the missed shots, the turnovers, the assists. I remember this is Your game, not mine. Teach me how to play again tomorrow.”

It does not have to be those exact words. What matters is your posture. You do not go to bed as the owner of the universe. You go to bed as a loved child who played their role and is now allowed to rest. Don’t you deserve to rest?

Rule No. 30

So here it is, the final rule in this Playbook:

RULE 30: REMEMBER WHOSE GAME THIS IS
You are responsible, but you are not in charge.

My prayer for you, and for myself, is that this rule becomes a quiet anchor beneath every other one. That as you finish races, confront blind spots, embrace pressure, risk obedience, leave the jersey better, and build a home court for others, you will never forget:

• You did not write the first word of your story.

• You will not write the last.

• You are not the hero of the gospel.

• You are the beloved, called, coached, corrected, and carried one.

We have spent week after week talking about how to play: how to show up with integrity, courage, humility, and faith in the lanes God has placed us in. But the deepest freedom does not come from mastering the plays. It comes from remembering the One who authored the game, who stepped into His own creation, who put on flesh instead of fabric, who wore no jersey but carried a cross, who laid down His life so that you and I could walk onto this court at all.

The truest victory is not that we learned how to win for ourselves. I have learned, and I am still learning, that the truest victory is that we learned how to worship while we play.

So as you step into what comes next, another day, another season, another quiet, ordinary moment, may you carry this with you:

You are not alone on this court.
You are not abandoned in this story.
You are not the One holding everything together.

Remember whose game this is. Play your position with joy. And even when weeping endures for a night, know and be comforted in the truth that joy comes in the morning.

When the buzzer sounds on this season, and December 31, 2025, at 11:59 p.m. turns into January 1, 2026, at 12:00 a.m., may you be able to say:

“I ran my race. I played my part. I trusted the One who knew the final score long before the tip-off.”

Learning to live the rules in the city that helped shape The Playbook.

Thank you for journeying with me in this season. Thank you for reading, responding, sharing, and reaching out to offer words of encouragement. Thank you for your support, and thank you for letting me be me as I learned to love myself in the way God loves me.

This is The Playbook: Rules for Life with me, Daniel C. Haynes. Forever the boy from the 592, now a man, living and loving.

I will find you in the next season.