Worst Possible Scenario Game

How often do you or members of your family find yourselves asking, “What’s the worst that could happen?” Some people ask the question from a positive point of view: “How bad could it be? We can handle whatever comes of this. It’s not a big deal. Even the worst isn’t the end of the world.”

Others of us feel compelled to imagine the worst possible scenario in hopes of somehow preparing ourselves and our families for all of the awful, terrible things that might happen next.

It’s a ridiculous impulse, isn’t it? It’s based on the illusion that we can control . . . anything. Many of us feel the need to maintain that illusion at all costs, even if the only control we have is preparing ourselves emotionally for disappointment.

It’s not just a way of deceiving ourselves, it also leads toward a sinful amount of fearfulness, controlling behavior, and even arrogance about our own ability to keep bad things from happening. God wants us to learn to trust Him with all the bad things that might happen—and learn to live joyfully in the moment that we’ve been given.

This month’s activity is about taking the ridiculous idea of being prepared for every contingency to it’s ridiculous logical conclusions. We’re going to make a game out of, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

NOTE: This game isn’t for all ages or for all families. It takes an ability to understand an abstract concept and to joke about really awful ideas. Younger and sensitive kids (and a few moms) might not understand or enjoy it.

Try This:

While on a long car ride or sitting around the dinner table, tell your family you’re going to have a kind of verbal competition called, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Explain that one of you would start by coming up with a scenario like this:

“Imagine we decided to get a pet baby alligator. It would be cute, and all of our friends would want to see it. What’s the worst that could happen?”

Then you would all take turns, one after the other, dreaming up the worst possible things that could happen with that scenario. For example:

“The alligator might eat all of our shoes, and we’d have to go barefoot everywhere.”

“Worse: The alligator might eat all the neighborhood pets, and everyone would hate us.”

“Worse: The alligator might be female and secretly pregnant and have dozens of baby alligators that scatter and hide in the basement getting bigger until one day they all come up to eat our whole family.”

“Worse: The alligator might get bitten by a radioactive mosquito and mutate into a kind of a super-villain with an insatiable appetite for human blood.”

“Worse: The baby alligator might get flushed down the toilet, crawl into the sewer system, get bitten by a radioactive mosquito, grow ten times its size, and end up terrorizing the countryside.”

You get the idea.

Once everyone in your family has had a chance to dream up a scenario, you can vote on who came up with the worst and/or funniest possible terrible scenario.

Application:

After you play a few rounds, mention to your family that this may (or may not) be a fun game, but lots of us play it in our heads for real all of the time. We describe to ourselves all the bad things that could happen at school that day, or at the baseball game, or at our job, or if we try to talk to someone about God.

And sometimes, we don’t do things that would be really great because we’re so good at imaging how everything could go wrong.

Remind your family of Philippians 4:6-8:

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”

Be sure to emphasize that there’s nothing wrong with being prepared for some bad things, but if we spend our whole lives looking out for what might go wrong we’ll never imagine all the great things that could happen if we do what God wants us to do.

Living for Him—really living at all—means taking some risks. And that means learning to wonder, “What the best that could happen?”

Help your family to learn to laugh at “worst that could happen” fearfulness and to begin to talk about trusting God with the risks that come with living for Him every day.

See more Activities.

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