OBEY ME!

I don't know about you but the idea of obeying someone really grinds my gears.

I hate, HATE, the idea of having to take orders from someone. There are always times that it comes into play, like if you are a student you obey the teacher. But even then you can choose not to and fail your courses if you want to I guess.

It's the idea of someone telling you how to live, where to go and what to do that really gets to me. This feeds into my desire to be the CEO and not the worker of any business I work in. I want to be the boss, I want to dish out the orders, I don't want to take them!

And I know that this isn't a unique trait to me. It seems to be a major problem with everyone in Gen iY (the next generation after Gen Y). I am a Gen Y'er but can totally relate to this desire to control my own destiny and not listen to anyone else who may tell me what to do.

Typical traits my fellow control freaks are disrespecting of parents wishes, knowing more than the teacher about what is good for me, not paying any attention to government or the laws that they might set, ignoring how annoying my music may be to my next-door neighbours/fellow passengers on the bus/anyone in the general vicinity.

(Random aside: why do people listen to music on public transport on speakers instead of headphones??!!! Do they really think that everyone else wants to listen to the latest rap/dance/hiphop/pop that they are into?! Come on people, they are PERSONAL sound systems!!)

But getting on with the topic....

Recently my amazing father-in-law bought my hubby and I our first car. Problem is it is still four weeks until I sit my license so I am not actually allowed to drive the thing yet. I did anyway. For the first two days of owning the car I threw the rule book out the window and experience freedom. 

Then Luke had a crisis of conscience and told me that we really shouldn't drive anymore illegally. Apparently breaking the law is bad. Apparently God isn't really for that either.

Kill joy.

The thing is I agree with Luke (and God) and I shouldn't be driving illegally and would have a fit if anyone of my friends did it. The thing that pissed me off was that someone, in the case the LAW, told me not to.

I have serious authority issues.

I usually don't bring it up at job interviews.

So I got to thinking:

What is it about obeying that annoys me so much?

And it's not just me! I know that YOU (yes you, reading this right now) have moments where obeying isn't exactly your forte. I know that there have been times when you have thrown the rule book out the window too. Maybe you didn't drive illegally, maybe it was eating more sweets than your mum said you could. But there was a time when you didn't want to, and didn't obey.

So if you are a Christian how does this rebellious nature work when we are dealing with all matters Godly?

This desire to not obey, to be in control, is the BIGGEST issue that separates us from God! Back in the Garden of Eden (whether it was metaphorical or not) the issue was that humanity not only wanted to disobey  God, but they wanted to BE God. To call the shots. That's why the serpent says to Eve "nah, you won't die you'll just be as smart

as God and know everything" (CSW (Christine Susan Welten) translation)

The tower of Babel was about people wanting to be God, to control the world. Abraham gets Hagar, instead of Sarah, pregnant because he tries to control how a prophecy will be fulfilled. Saul gets kicked out of being the king because he does all the sacrificial stuff himself instead of waiting like God had told him. Israel as a country repeatedly refuses to obey God and ends up in exile with the Temple destroyed.

The Bible is FULL of people who couldn't find it in themselves to obey God. And these are people who saw God walking with them in the garden, as smoke on a mountain, as a pillar of fire, and angelic messengers. They had all this cool stuff happen and they still slipped in obeying.

It seems to be the major failure of humanity.

Only Jesus obeyed God 100% and even then he prays, that, if at all possible, what had to happen could be cancelled. 

So if we have this amazingly huge flaw that all of humanity suffers from, what the heck are we suppose to do about it??

Well, I don't know.

Truly.

I think that it is about prayer.

It is through talking to God, admitting our failures and our desire to control (and how badly we do it!), and saying "I want you to be in charge" that we learn to actually let God be in charge.

Even praying that we want God to be in charge in a sense is obedience. We are obeying the command to pick up our cross and follow Jesus. We are saying in effect "I don't know how to do this, but I am trying." We are letting God in and giving him the authority to start changing our hearts.

It is about listening.

In prayer we start to learn to hear God's voice instead of just our own. It takes time and practice to know God's voice in amongst all the other noises in our world and prayer is massive in being part of us being able to hear it.

If we are listening well to God then we will feel when there is a conviction for us to change something. We begin to hear and recognise the call to do something, go somewhere, help somebody. And we learn to respond with "YES" when we hear it. We begin to obey the voice of God as we learn to listen for it.

It is about talking.

We aren't meant to do life alone. Obeying stuff can be hard, particularly when it seems to be inbuilt into us to disobey. 

So we need to talk to each other about our struggles and failings. We need to be honest about the things we find hard to give up or start. We need to pray with each other and for each other so that we can draw on the strength of the community when we are doing something that we know we shouldn't but we don't want to stop.

It is about reading.

We NEED to read the Bible. We need to do this so we can know how God works, how God speaks, and what God says. We need to read it so we can learn what God's voice might sound like and when we have got it really really wrong. Because we don't always get it right and sometimes what we feel is right is actually not what is right.

Praying, listening, talking, reading.

Doesn't sound so hard, but it is.

But when we start doing these things we will start to see our lives change for the better. We learn to love God and others more, we become more humble and accepting of life and the rules in it. We learn to respect people and the things that they say and enforce. 

In short, we become more like Christ.

"Not my will Father, but your be done."

The On-going Saga

It just keeps going.

Since my last update on weight-loss there has been, and hasn't been, a bit to report.

I have been doing a no-carb diet that I have been told will restart my metabolism and get my body working again in eating itself. I have been doing the gym and Luke and I have given up all takeaways, fizzy drink (apart from those with no sugar), desserts (the biggest blow!) and any snacky things that are bad for us. 

The Result?

Luke has lost 5 kilos and I have lost nothing! 

AHHHHHHHHHH!

I cannot even tell you my frustration with this. I have no idea if any of you have battled the bulge but I tell you, to do all that work, to give up the things you love and then to have no result is so demoralizing I can't even tell you.

I keep telling myself that it is good for my insides to do this stuff. Apparently it is meant to be good for my mental health...not! It is far more depressing having to go to the gym for nothing than not doing exercise!

I have also been delving deep into my psyche (a scary and dangerous adventure) to try and figure out what my triggers are, where I trip myself up. I have been thinking deeply about why I like chocolate so much (if that isn't instantly obvious) and how I manage to sabotage myself.

And I have learnt something that I think is important enough to share with those out there in the virtual world who may also have the same issues.

I have learnt that I find this so psychologically hard because I have two different internal dialogues going on about the same issue.

On one hand I have this voice that is saying to me that I shouldn't bother. It says to me that there are so many young women in the world who are bombarded daily with messages telling them that to be desirable and happy they need to be skinny. It says to me that I sho

uld be a living example that says to them that you can be happy, you can find an amazing husband, you can be successful without being skinny. It says that I could live as an opposite of what the world says.

On the other there is a voice that says my body is a temple. I should be losing weight (and trying my hardest to do so) because of my faith in God and because I want to honour what he has given me. I want to live as an example of someone who perseveres in the face of insurmountable odds. I want to give hope to those struggling to lose weight.

So I want to be an example and give hope to people. A admirable thing I think but they are complete opposites to each other!!

I am going to try and pray my way through this one until I can figure out what to do. I still want to go to the gym either way but I don't want my life to be about focusing on weight, food, and exercise. I am lost and slightly confused and that will not help with staying on course with the hard work.

I need to figure this out. Thoughts welcome :)

What's the Big Deal?

Over the last few years I have been studying theology. It has been an interesting journey with many changes in thinking and faith that has at times messed with me, and at others inspired me.

Recently I have been contemplating the idea of tradition in the church. I don't understand the big deal around communion, meditation, liturgy, fasting and even at baptism!! Is this stuff really necessary? What is the big deal?

Perhaps it is because I am a child of my post modern generation that I don't understand this stuff. I understand the symbolism and things but are they traditions that are needed to keep the church alive and flourishing? If all we need is Jesus then why do we need all this other stuff as well?

So today I started an experiment. I decided that I would meditate and fast (only for lunch mind mind you at this stage haha) and see what happens. 

I have just finished meditating to the sound of Gregorian chanting. Now call me crazy but I had no idea how to meditate! I had to look up on the internet different forms of Christian meditation. It made me feel a little silly, but how else does one learn to do these things?

The first thing I noticed straight away is how impossibly hard it is to actually focus your mind. I was breathing slowly, thinking about Jesus, listening to the chanting (which is awesome btw, totes check it out!!) and then bam! I am thinking about what to make for dinner. This happened over and over again to my frustration. Apparently this gets easier to avoid as you meditate more but at this stage I feel like I have failed at simply thinking about God. I haven't, but I feel it.

Another thing I noticed is how relaxing it is just to sit for a long period of time (15 mins haha) without doing anything and just thinking about Jesus. It feels like a complete waste of time! I have so much stuff to be doing that I felt like I was wasting time instead of doing something productive. And yet I felt at peace, like deep calm, for the first time in I don't know how long.

I also realised that it does help focus you on God because you are doing it intentionally and that means I was actually wanting to think about my life, God's love, my sin etc. It really made me feel like I was connecting with God. I felt God's pleasure at the fact that I was just spending time trying to hear what might be said to me. Don't know if that makes sense but I really did experience something.

So phase one was difficult but ultimately successful. I intend to meditate daily for at least a few weeks to see what continues to happen so watch this space.

The fasting thing kinda sucks because I am hungry (!!) and I keep thinking about lunch and then remembering I am not going to eat any. This makes me sad. But apparently the feeling of hunger is there to remind you of God's presence and to motivate you to pray. There are stories of great things happening when people fast and real answers to prayer, so who knows what will happen. 

I think I will fast over lunch for a few days and see what happens again. 

The reason I am doing this stuff is not because I am simply trying to test it. I don't really like the idea of testing God so much. What I have learnt over the years is that tradition helps ground us in the story of which we are a part.

The church is not just about people today who worship God. It is about the last 2000 years of people who have sought to see God's face. What they have learnt is important. If someone started doing something 2000 years ago (and Jesus did fast!!) and that has continued then who am I to say that it is not good enough for believers today?

Tradition reminds me of the people who have gone before. There is a great cloud of witnesses who have walked our road in different places and who have learnt things that I may never learn if I don't listen to them. Just because I don't understand is not a reason to reject something. I don't understand how Jesus' death and resurrection really worked but I don't deny it because of that! There is faith that people know what they are talking about, that people are smarter and wiser than me that have figured stuff out long before I was even thought of.

Traditions help continue stories. Just like cultural traditions ground people in the story of their country and ethnicity, so church traditions ground us in the story of the Bride of Christ, the church. They tell us who we are and why we are and where we are going. They give us an identity and meaning.

There are traditions that I don't agree with however. As I am not Catholic, venerating Mary is something I find very hard to reconcile with Biblical text. I am not saying accept every tradition ever as gospel truth. They need to be thought out before being worked out. I have spent 5 years working through this stuff in theological training. It took me that long to decide to try any of them. 

Baptism, mediation, fasting, and communion all have Scriptural references, are all performed by Christ (and many others) and all focus on God as our provider, creator and sustainer. These things I am happy to accept, live out, and teach to others. But it took me a while to get to that place.

So I am not going to 'test' the traditions, or throw them out, but rather embrace them as something I can learn from, something that will give me greater insight into how the church works and the people that are in it. 

I will do these things because the church isn't about me. It is about a faithful people who walk together, learn of each other, and pass on their knowledge to future generations.

Want to join me?

My Oxymoronic Life (a freeverse poem)

Great is thy faithfulness echoes in my head as the light around me fades and the silence intensifies. My instinct is to flee into some make believe world of my own or another's making. It seems the hardest thing to be is to just be. And so I find myself in flights of fancy, subconciously trying to avoid a conference with my King. I hide from laying myself bare, knowing that you see beneath this epidermal mask through to the throbbing, beating, bleeding core that yearns to be known yet acts as if the antithesis of that is more desirable. Driven by fear my being shrinks from the touch of love as if it would expose, humiliate and take advantage of the weaknesses, the cracks, in my existence. Love terrifies me.

Though it is a solace that frees me from a captivity of my own making, I seek refuge in the dream that Hollywood abuses me in. The fantasy that prods and pokes at my not so perfect body, laughs at my failures, and covers up my wounds with sickly sweet smiles that cause cavities in my soul. This is what I run to. I hide in the world where everyone loves me as long as I am loveable and I play pretend over tea parties where we soak our minds in a brew of poison that I willingly swallow. It demands my all and I give it until I bleed green bills and gold and cry tears of the blood of young women who never did quite make it. All this to hide from love. An oxymoronic life that seeks the one thing that it refuses to accept.

Until caught in the arms of one who drags me kicking and screaming into the light. Who, despite my best efforts, will not let me go, will not give up. Quietly as a child I lie in those arms and allow myself to be rocked to sleep....that is until I decide to learn to run again.

Thesis Update - Halo, Skyrim, Heroes and Saints.

As you may be aware if you are reading this update, I am doing my Masters thesis on biblical ethics and gaming (see link here if you want the low down).

I love getting into reading and trying to take what people have already said and apply it to what I am thinking about. Yes, I am a nerd. I am doing a thesis on gaming!! I think NERD is really an understatement.

Anywho, I have been reading aaaalllloooooooooooot for this thesis already and am really interested by the ideas that are coming out. And as promised, I am going to share my musings with you lucky lucky people.

Got your snacks and beverages? Ok, let's get this thing underway.

A am currently totally in love with the work of one particular ethicists called Samuel Wells. Particularly his book called Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (which can be found here).

Mind blowing stuff I can tell you.

The overly simplified version of his argument is that "ethics presupposes context, and an understanding of context presupposes narrative; yet if context is to be understood as genuinely communal, and ethics as genuinely interactive, then narrative must be understood as drama." (59)

So what he is saying is that ethics needs to be for people in a time and place, and you only understand that time and place if you understand the story that brought the people to it. You with me? So if that time and place is for a community (not just an individual) and ethics is something we do (not just think about) then the narrative is not just a story that people tell, it is one that is lived out and one that ethics has an impact on.

You following still?

He goes on to argue that for ethics to really really engage with a community (in this circumstance a Christian community that uses the Bible as Scripture) then the Bible is not a text that we memorise and then act out, as a drama would imply. Rather, it is a story we immerse ourselves in to the point where we know it so well we can improvise while remaining faithful to the text, to God, and to our community.

Like I said, this dude blows my mind! Loving it!!!

So even though that in itself is an amazing concept, it is not what I want to look at today.

What I want to engage with is Wells' idea that secular ethics is looking for heroes, while Christian ethics is about making saints.

Bear with me, all will be revealed.....

.....now.

Well's talks about how Aristotle, the Father of ethics, talked about virtues as the way a character of a human should be, rather than ethics being about decisions we make in crisis situations.

Virtues = character.

He held up as the pinnacle of a person who had mastered the virtues the idea of the 'Hero'. The Hero is someone who is strong and brave. They protect the weak and use their strength for good. They rely on their own strength rather than on the weakness of others, and if the fail it is catastrophic for not only themselves but the people they are protecting. The best death would be one in battle, as it takes the most courage to go out and fight so to die this way would be exemplary. 

The Hero = Superman (Christopher Reeves style)

On the other hand you have Aquinas, one of the early church Fathers. He liked the idea of the virtues but he changed them around a bit and said that instead of heroes, the biblical values built Saints. The Saint is someone who is serving of others, filled with the fruits of the Spirit (love peace patience kindness etc), and the virtues help them to follow Christ. 

For the hero the story is about them. For the saint it is about God.

For the hero the story is about celebrating their strengths. For the saint it is about celebrating faith.

The hero will die fighting in inevitable conflict. The saint will die as a martyr because they refused to fight for they believe that Christ has already won.

Hero = Soldier

Saint = Martyr

So this got me to thinking:

What stories are games portraying? Who are they honouring, the saint or the hero? What are they teaching us is the better thing to be?

If you look at any game you can see that it is the Hero that is celebrated. You need to fight well, protect others, be strong and courageous. Death isn't really wanted, but you can rejuvenate and better to die in a battle that to not battle at all.

Gaming loves Heroes.

Because really, what kind of game would it be if the main character was a saint who didn't fight!!?? It wouldn't sell, people don't want to be that character.

And I think that is the thing that most interests me about all this. That deep down we all want to be heroes. We don't want to not pick up a sword/gun/laser and not fight. We don't want to be seen as weak and pathetic. And gaming latches on to that need in all of us to be the hero. We won't accept that maybe only a few people ever will be real heroes, we want to be it too!! We won't accept that in this life there may not be opportunities to be heroic, we want it now!! And we certainly don't want to be told that we SHOULDN'T be a hero, that it is opposite to the biblical message.

So where this has left me is wondering if there is something to being a hero in games that is redeemable. Can we live out of a belief that would have us be martyr's but play games where we get to feed the fantasy of being the opposite?

Can we reconcile the Hero of gaming and the Saint of the Bible??

Someone to Hold, Someone to Blame

I was talking to some friends on the way home from church today and an interesting comment was made. It went something along these lines:

"It seems that the people who are suffering have more hope in God than the family members and loved ones that watch them suffer. It is the watchers that tend to blame God."

This comment came out of all of us recollecting various stories of people who had suffered and those that had blamed God. This is a generalisation but one that seems to hold true to various people in various circumstances.

For example, one friend of ours has a sister that is in serious pain and illness. She clings to God. He is angry at God for what she is going through.

So we came up with a hypothesis of why this is.

For anyone who has been in suffering for a long period of time, there tends to be a point when you know that it may never change. With long term illness or mental disorders, divorce, death etc, there is a point when you either accept that the pain will be there for a long time, perhaps forever, or you give up.  If you give up then this tends to lead to isolation from others, depression, and suicide or, in faith terms, ditching your faith and hating the world around you. Acceptance of the pain doesn't mean that you are ok with what is happening, but it tends to pull you outward, draws you into acknowledging that you won't survive this on your own strength. In faith terms, this tends to mean a deepening of faith.

This is because in times of weaknesses we need someone to cling to. When we are children and we are hurting we don't blame our parents for it, we cling to them because they are the biggest, strongest people they know and they may be able to fix it.

It is similar to faith at times. God is the biggest thing we know and so in times of struggle when our pain is too much for us to bear we cling to our faith, hoping that it will give us strength. 

The people who are not directly involved in the suffering but are affected by it (our friends and family) may not understand our need to cling to God. Because for them all they see is someone they love in pain. And they need someone to blame. They need to be able to get angry and yell at someone for the hurt they see us going through. It is often through witnessing pain that people lose faith in God and God's goodness.

Now the complete opposite can be true in both cases. The sufferer can lose faith because they reject what is happening to them and need to blame someone, and the watcher can have faith because it is the only thing they have left to lean on.

But, and here is my point, in times of suffering we all need someone to hold or someone to blame.

I find that really profound.

It speaks of a deep-seated need within us all for love and comfort.

It speaks of a desire for justice.

It speaks of God.

See, if we are all just random atoms that came together and started an evolutionary chain, why would we need justice in a situation that is outside of anyone's control? Wouldn't we just write it off as survival of the fittest and grieve, but not get angry?

I would argue that it is because at the very core of who we are we know that there is something wrong with our world. Children are not meant to die. People are not meant to suffer. Mental illness should not exist. And we know that, everyone of us, we feel it deep inside. So when we do watch a loved one in pain we get angry and the wrongness of it and need something to blame. 

We tend to blame God.

And yet we are pointing in the wrong direction.

It is not God's fault that this happens. It is because there is something really wrong with the world. It is called sin. We are broken. Creation is broken. I don't mean that because a child lies to their parents they then get cancer! That's ridiculous. Illness is not a punishment. 

What I mean by sin is that we as humanity, not just as individuals, have decided to not love God and not love other people and not respect creation. We have pushed God out of the picture and wanted to make ourselves God for millennia. We haven't loved other people and so rape, prostitution, porn, child abuse, theft...you name it... happens because humanity has no love for each other. We haven't respected creation so we have used and abused resources, so some kids die of obesity related illness while others starve. Carcinogenic are our fault, as is skin cancer from a depleted ozone.

Our desire to run this world our way, instead of God's way, has meant that creation has broken to the point where our own cells are in rebellion against us. Death is a part of everything, sickness invades our lives. And because it is all consuming, because it affects everything, because it is so huge, we point to the biggest thing we know and blame them. We blame God.

And yet it is NOT God's fault. God didn't want my friend's baby to die of cot death at only a few months old. God didn't want me to have schizophrenia. God doesn't want our friends sister to be in constant pain. God hates sin and death and proved it by showing us that it is defeated! God showed us that there is life after all the crap by dying first and coming back to life. God showed us by example.

In our times of deepest struggle God is there. God is breathing live and love. God is giving strength and hope. God is speaking a message of salvation and redemption that means even though we go through crap now it will not be forever. We will be renewed. We will live without pain.

So to all of those that are struggling...there is hope. 

And to all of those watching...there is hope.

And to all of us who get angry and confused and cry for justice...there is hope!

Don't give up, don't walk away from faith, don't lose hope. God was there, God is here, God will always be there.

God, Gaming and Thesis Writing

Last night I got the news that my Masters Thesis proposal has been accepted.

What this means is I get to start writing 40,000 words on my chosen topic starting now.

And my topic is (drum role please):

HOW BIBLICAL ETHICS IMPACTS THE WAY WE PLAY MASSIVE MULTI-PLAYER ONLINE GAMES (MMPOGS).

Ooooohhhh yeah, I get to study gaming people!

Unfortunately, due to the size of a thesis it is impossible for me to look at gaming in general, so I had to narrow it to MMPOG's only. But this includes things like World of Warcraft and Second life, both massive virtual worlds with thousands of players.

And you, you lucky people, will get to hear about it as I go along. I would love love love ideas, feedback, thoughts and musings on this as I go. I know there are a lot of gamers out there, tell me what you think about my stuff as I write it up. It may really help shape where I go with it.

The reason I picked this topic was really a bit of a journey for me. See, I am not a gamer!! I don't play video games or partake in online virtual worlds (apart from facebook games, but do they really count). It seems rather odd for me to focus on gaming when I have nothing to do with it. 

But I do through my husband, friends, church, and facebook friends. I know so many gamers. There are those like my hubby who play any game and don't care about whether it is right or not to run down a prostitute in GTA (grand Theft Auto) with your car as it is all only pixels anyway. Or there are others, like a friend of mine, who only ever play the hero first time through a game because they don't like being the 'bad guy'.

This resulted in many conversations. I questioned the use of violence in video games, and asked whether or not someone could justify violence even if it was on a screen. Debates ensued and this thesis topic was born.

See, where I come from is if Jesus is Lord of all, then he is Lord of all worlds, virtual or not. And if he is Lord of the virtual too, then surely the standards and ethics that we follow as Christians apply to the virtual as well as the real. If that is true, then surely we as Christians must critically engage with gaming and establish an understanding of biblical ethical conduct within the virtual world.

The reason that I have decided to go with MMPOG's is because they are where community has been redefined. Actions within MMPOG's affect other players, even if it is their avatars who are being directly involved. It is in these games that a separate reality, not a false reality, has been formed. I say this because for many people, these worlds are where they have their friends, community, social life, and sometimes businesses. The virtual world is their reality.

Because these worlds are reality for players, then there must be a way that a biblical ethical theory can apply to the actions within the worlds.

I hope all that made sense.

The big question that I usually get asked is "does this mean that gaming is bad?" or "are you going to say that Christians shouldn't game?"

Not at all! Just as there are some bad movies out there doesn't mean that Christians are banned from watching movies. What it does mean is that Christians need to be aware of the messages that are being portrayed. It means critically engaging and thinking through the issues that they portray. And, in extreme cases, using wisdom and not watching what is bad for you!!

The same goes for gaming. This is a fairly new industry and yet it has over taken the movie industry in sales and viewers. This means it is prolific in our world and should be taken seriously. As every (!!) NZ home with children under 18 has a gaming capable machine in it, it follows that the church engages with this and thinks about it very seriously.

Because if Christ is the Lord of our lives, then there shouldn't be an area where we can act contrary to what we believe.

The other section of my thesis is about forming a biblical ethic that engages both our actions and our thoughts (ie love God with your heart and mind and strength) and then applying that to gaming. I haven't really got to work on that part yet so that will be the musings of my next post.

See you next time :)