Flappy Bird is gone as quickly as it arrived.
If you don’t hang out with children and teenagers then you may not know anything about Flappy Bird. Flappy Bird is a mobile game that took the world by storm. The gameplay involves tapping the phone’s screen to keep a bird flying while navigating obstacles. A player’s score is based upon the number of obstacles he or she passed. One obstacle passed equals a score of one.
The game’s insane popularity was fueled by its addictive nature. The possibility of passing one more obstacle and getting an even higher score led many to play Flappy Bird for hours. I downloaded the game but couldn’t score higher than seven. My futility led to frustration and I ultimately deleted the game. I was even more frustrated when my students would share their high scores, which were often over 100.
I wasn’t the only person frustrated with Flappy Bird. The game’s creator, Dong Nguyen, deleted the game so that it could no longer be downloaded. Through his Twitter, Nguyen shared that he simply couldn’t keep the game going anymore. Those who had already downloaded the game can still play it, but it is no longer available for new downloads.
According to an article from Time.com, Nguyen was making $50,000 a day from Flappy Bird’s advertisements. That is an insane amount of money for anybody, but especially for someone who lives in an underdeveloped nation like Vietnam, which Nguyen does.
Nguyen hasn’t shared his reasons for taking down his game, but that kind of extreme, overnight success can’t be easy to handle. It also can’t be easy to have thousands of people tweeting at you because they’re frustrated with your game. I hate getting one or two negative comment cards after I preach; I couldn’t imagine getting thousands of tweets a day deriding my work.
Sometimes we wonder why God has us where we’re at. We want a more successful, a more famous or a more profitable life. We look at the success, fame and wealth of others and wonder when our starship is going to come in. There’s a good chance, though, that God isn’t bringing that ship in because he knows we can’t handle it. Perhaps God isn’t withholding from us as much as he is preserving us.
How do you trust that God is giving you what you need when he doesn’t give you what you want?
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