On Batman and Video Games

Human society has been creating paradoxes for centuries.
In fact, one could argue that it is a paradox for us to live in organized society; just read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

Perhaps one of the more recent additions to Humanity's ever-growing paradoxical activities is the creation of the MMORPG.
Most of you in my age bracket will instantly think of Runescape with horrified nostalgia.
The MMORPG has taken human interaction and removed the human aspect of it.
You walk/fly around a completely virtual world with countless other people doing the same things.
You never see people face-to-face, but you talk to them and interact in the game.
Games have changed the way humans interact with each other; they have a negative impact on how we communicate in person, but a positive impact on how we organize and collaborate.

But what i find most interesting about MMORPGs is the time and energy that people are willing to commit to them.
Millions of Americans spend hours per day making money and building skills in WOW.
People in Korea have DIED from playing games nonstop.
That's an investment of 100% of their life.
That means that building their character in the game was more important than building their lives in real life.

It's disturbing.
But as much as there's counseling for game addictions and people willing to spend hundreds of dollars on in-game items, literally BILLIONS of people are walking around life exactly like those Koreans who refuse to eat or drink anything other than pizza and red bull.

We think it's ridiculous that people spend so much time in fake, man-made universes.
But we spend all our time in the world.
"Real Life" isn't as real as people think it is.

Check out the great words of King Solomon:
"What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.
The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course.
All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from, there they return again.
All things are wearisome, more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing.
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." [Ecclesiastes 1:3-9, NIV]

Do the last few sentences seem familiar?
There are a couple million people playing WOW right now, and they're all doing the same exact thing.
Sure, they go about it in different ways, but they all have similar objectives and go through similar steps.
There isn't a whole lot of room for innovation; not a lot of room to do something new- you just follow the rules of the game.

That's how life is, too.
You go through the motions: get an education, get a job, make money, get married, start a family, keep trying to make money, die, pass the torch on to your kids...
Not a whole lot else happens.
From Solomon's perspective, the whole thing is kind of a drag.
Why even bother with life?

Bother because theres a whole lot more out there to live for than ourselves.

In Batman: Dark Night, they do a good job of portraying how ridiculously rich Bruce Wayne is.
But what makes Bruce Wayne different from everyone else is how he uses his money.
All the mobsters only want money to have it; its all greed.
Bruce uses his money to fight evil and bring peace to Gotham.
Having money wasn't important to him.
It was only a tool used for a higher purpose.

Likewise, the things of the world shouldn't mean anything to us.
We should have as much invested in this place as a kid playing a video game.
Because the only use the things of the world are to us are as a tool to save the lost; what else is there to do with yourself?

In Isaiah 55:1&2, God says, "Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters;
and you who have no money, come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.
Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?
Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare."

The important part of life has nothing to do with what we have or don't have.
You can be a homeless bum and still be better off than people who have it all.
And like Bruce Wayne, why spend effort on useless junk?
spend it on what actually makes a difference.

On Multitasking

New York has a law that you can't talk on a cell phone while you're driving unless you have a headset.
Presumably, this is to ensure that drivers keep both hands on the wheel.

But there was some study conducted about phone use, and that when you're talking on the phone to someone, your brain functions differently than if you were talking to them in person. This is because you don't have the facial expressions and such that come with face-time, so your brain has to interpolate them.
Oddly enough, this is the same part of your brain that you need for driving.
In short, using your cell phone makes you less able to concentrate on driving.
But we all knew that.


Have you ever been in a car with someone who is a sucker for yard sales?
They drive by a lawn and slow down so they can get a glimpse of the goods; if it's worth it, they stop by and get a closer look.
Or maybe even just driving by a countryside, and you look out the window at the scenery.
You maybe slow down a little bit, get more relaxed, and don't worry about the road so much.

Here's something else you should know:
People say all the time that "life is a journey; the destination isn't so much important as the experience of getting there" or somesuch to that idea.
I've always had an issue with people who say that.
Because to me, life is more than a journey.
Life has a purpose; a point.

We are driving on a road that is about a lot more than pretty scenery.

When we refer to Jesus' way as the "straight and narrow", i can't help but think about those driving distractions that i mentioned a few lines up; cell phones, yard sales, pretty flowers, traffic... it takes our mind off the road.
And when you're not paying full attention to the road, you can trip up a little.
Maybe you find yourself drifting out of the lane, or slowing down.
That's not something that should happen to our walks with God.

But it feels like in (cliche alert) today's world, we are bombarded with distractions.
TV, computers, friends and family, the mere constant tug of society.
I equate that all to your phone ringing in the car, or an accident in another lane that draws your attention away from in front of you.
We have such a hard time staying focused on the road, which is straight anyway.
Straight is the easiest direction to drive in, but i know i find myself turning all the times... making turns that shouldn't exist.
Getting myself lost on the (cliche again) road of life.

I had a lot more to write that actually made sense and didn't just spit out random cliches that everyone already knows, i just can't remember it right now... if we can manage to keep ourselves un-distracted for a little bit, we could just gun it down the highway instead of plodding around the slow lane.
I want to go as fast as i can because the Father is at the end of the road.
I know it's called a "walk", but walking feels too slow.

On Grace and Perhaps Better Perspective

So I now, officially, have a "favorite parable".
I was reading through Matthew when i was in new york a week and a half ago, and i settled on this one for a while.
And then a few days ago i couldn't stop thinking about practical uses of it for witnessing or teaching, or telling teenagers that they're morons.

It's the beginning of Matthew 20, and it reads as such, in the NIV; Jesus is talking:

"For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire men to work in his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius (a typical day's wages) for the day and sent them into his vineyard.
About the third hour he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He told them, 'You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.' So they went.
He went out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour and did the same thing. About the eleventh hour he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them,
'Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?'
'Because no one has hired us,' they answered.
He said to them, 'You also go and work in my vineyard.'
When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, 'Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.'
The workers who were hired about the eleventh hour came and each received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they began to drumble against the landowner. 'These men who were hired last worked only one hour,' they said, 'and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.'
'But he answered one of them, 'Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Didn't you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Ir are you envious because I am generous?'
So the last will be first, and the first will be last."


The key part here is when the owner tells the worker, "Friend, I am not being unfair to you."

There is a line from a Relient K song that reads, "The beauty of grace is that it makes life not fair".
The vineyard owner had grace towards the workers that he hired later in the day; he didn't have to pay them a full day's wages, as the only people he had a contract with were those who would work for 12 hours.
But rather than pay them what might have been fair, he opted to pay them more. Perhaps he figured that, them being unemployed, they could use some spare change. He was generous.

Now, the people who he hired fairly weren't happy with that.
The figured that they were getting jipped out of money since they had done 11 more hours of work than some of the others, and gotten payed the same way.

Jesus' message here calls for a change in perspective.
The workers were upset because they were only thinking about what they should have gotten, instead of what the others could have gotten.
If they had paused for a moment and realized that the owner was being generous to the other men, rather than skimping on themselves, the situation would have made more sense.

The parable ends with the line that, "the last will be first and the first will be last."
The last being the one-hour workers vs. the 12-hour workers- but in the end, we're all equals anyway.

Think about that though.
One little shift in perspective, and it goes from, "you skimped out on us!" to, "you blessed someone else".
One little change in perspective and the perceived attitude goes from disdain to grace.
That's a big difference.

From now on, i'm going to use this parable when someone asks me about my opinion on abortion or the death penalty.
to me, abortion isn't a question of whether or not you're killing a human being; rather, it's a question of our right to choose who lives or dies.
A mother who says, "the baby is more important than I am" and who is willing to take on all the problems that might come her way, be it financial or health, is showing that she isn't interested in her own problems; isn't like the first workers. Rather, she is showing that she needs grace in order to get by- the attitude that Jesus wants us to have, and perhaps the attitude of the one-hour workers.

Likewise, for the death penalty.
It isn't a question of whether or not someone deserves death- i believe that there are absolutely cases where someone deserves to die.
But who are we, fellow and equal human beings, to decided the fate of another?
We are all equals. The vineyard owner showd us that. Some of us just need more grace than others.