Happy Holidays, everyone! I hope you all had an awesome Thanksgiving--I know I did. I know the Christmas season started two months ago, but I suppose late is better than never to start listening to Christmas music.
Here's a little something special to kick off the season!
A friend and I were reminiscing the other day about the sorry state of games with an explicit Christian target audience. And, since I consider game designing to be one of my bigger hobbies, I figured..."Hey, why not?" That could definitely bring in some extra income! After thinking about it for a bit, I realized it's not very fun to make any truly edifying games, and it certainly wouldn't be very profitable. I had way more fun making up some games that...well, I won't spoil the fun.
Now, I know what you're thinking. I'm going to put these on here, and you're going to come along and snatch up my game ideas! Well, it happened before (see here), and I'm ready for it this time. Chances are, by the time you read this, I'll be halfway back from the permit office, cackling all the way!
Now, without further ado, here are the most awesome 'Christian' games to never hit the market! Read them and bask in their awesomeness!
Cryptic Praise
Remember those days when the WWJD and FROG trinkets were cool? It was way sweet to walk around with an acronym that nobody knew tagged to your wrist/ankle/neck, and when they asked you, you got to boast your faith to the unsuspecting stranger! What fun! It's a shame that everybody knows what those mean nowadays...but with this game, you get the chance to wear fashionable phylacteries all over again! There are several dice with letters that are rolled into a grid (not unlike Boggle), and the players come up with some sly sayings with the letters in the grid! All the phrases are written down and voted on, and the winner gets to make a bracelet (with the companion "Cryptic Praise Craft Kit," of course)! First to make ten bracelets wins! Come out with such zingers as WYGMBSR (When You Get More Better; Sanctification Rocks!) or PLMSP (Please Let Me Say Prayers)! The possibilities are endless, as well as the fun of being smug about your covert holiness!
Prosperopoly (Tagline: "Get ahead without being left behind!")
Remember the parable about the servants and the talents? Well, that was really about how Jesus wants us to be rich and happy on Earth before we meet him in Heaven. What better way to be happy than to be richer than everyone you know? In this Monopoly-esque board game, each player is trying to amass a bigger fortune than his brotherly rivals. Sometimes it's a tough world out there, and 'liberties' need to be taken to make sure you can maximize your returns. Just draw a Sin Token and bend the rules to your liking--you can always earn back your salvation with good works (or a 10% donation between Park Place Ministries and the Boardwalk Church Campus)! But be careful to look for the end-times (Such as 'Rumor of Wars,' 'Euro Increases in Value,' and the dead giveaway, 'Popular National Leader Elected'). If the "Rapture" Card is drawn, and if you have even one Sin Token left, you're left behind, and lose immediately! The winner is the raptured player with the most capital!
Sinspotting - The DVD Game
This great family game now harnesses the latest technology to teach us how different we are from those who don't know Jesus! Players split into two teams and a randomly selected vignette is played on the DVD player. Teams have thirty seconds to identify as many sins as they can before time runs out--your team gets a point for every sin noticed that the other team failed to (Note: "Bad Acting," while prevalent, is not a sin). Points are amassed quickly, so the first to 153 (a very important Biblical number) wins the game! *UPDATE* Sinspotting now comes in a brand new "Travel Edition" you can take along with you next time you venture into the pagan populous! It includes sinpads, pencils, and a timer. Just point at a person or group of people near you, observe, and start condemning!
Battleground: Denomi-Nation
The Great Commission can be pretty difficult to accomplish at times, especially with so many other denominations out there trying to beat us to the punch, so why not play this game to feel as if you're converting the world?! Although it may seem somewhat similar to Risk, the stakes are ever so much higher! The board is a map of a generic city (you can name it whatever you like--name it the town you live in for your first game, but it can be somewhere more exotic, like "Seattle" or "London" if you're feeling more dangerous!) Each player takes a set of wooden colored cubes and a denomination card. Then the dark, sinner-colored cubes are placed randomly around the map. The players then take turns placing their faithful, converting sinner-cubes into their specific saint-color cubes. The game really takes off when each player utilizes their denomination's super-powers! Is your revenue dwindling with your church membership? Hold pageants and programs to lure in the other player's cubes to make them your own! Are the remaining sin-cubes in your area making your faithful feel unsafe? Play a "Cultural Suppression" card and push those difficult cubes into the other player's back yard! Worried about losing your denomination's tax-exempt status? Just succeed at a Get-Out-The-Vote dice roll and install local government leaders that agree with you, and watch the other denominations scurry! Who needs to be part of a body, when you can be the biggest, baddest ear around?! Of course, Battleground:Denomi-Nation will have future expansion packs, granting in-depth abilities to the denominations, and allowing you to create your own! Who can stand against an army of faithful saints when they have "Contemporary Worship," "Political Connections," and "Works-Based Theology" on their side!?
Coming soon to a Christian Book store near you!
I've been getting into a lot more reading nowadays than I have been in the past couple of years. And while I'm ahead, I'm trying to read through books one at a time, in the order that I receive them. It sounds like a small nit-picky thing, and it kinda is, but I want to hold out on some semblance of structure for this quasi-leisure activity as long as I can.
Before I left Kansas, a good friend gave me the book "Decisions, Decisions, Decisions: Facing Crossroads" by O.D. (eye doctor slang for "Mr.") Phillip Adams. I've read some good books in my time, and this book... was not one of them. It did, however, lead to some constructive thought which I'll try to explain further down.
However let me first rant about the things that bugged me. It'll make me feel better. There were two big things that bugged me about the book.
Primarily, and most obviously, the writing style was pretty poor. I will admit that I was given a fair warning beforehand about it, and the warning proved reliable even in the first few pages of the book. The good doctor is much better at rambling than at writing. It's definitely hard sometimes to follow authors when they try to explain complicated concepts, but this guy was all over the place. I could go into detail (I actually did, but deleted it on review), but since he's an optical doctor and not a literature doctor, I'll cut it short. I will say that I finally figured out what the book was about on page 129. It was about motivating Christians to run hard after Christ. Go figure.
I don't think it was just the literary shortcomings that prevented me from grasping the book's thesis, though. The doctor and I also have some theological differences, which made it pretty hard to translate at times. I wish Christians (specifically me) weren't hindered by how other Christians understand God, but then again we are all quite incapable of understanding a limitless God with our limited minds. Unfortunately for me, I get pretty passionate about my perceptions of God's sovereignty as well as His grace. O.D. Adams talks about 'kairos moments', which represents points of time where we turn closer or further away from God. At first, I thought he was doing a pretty good job of trying to explain God's omniscience in light of free will, but the more he talked about 'kairos moments,' the more convoluted (if not contradictory) the concept became, and the more frustrated I got. I also had a really hard time understanding that telling one or two lies doesn't make one a 'liar' (I can see it now..."But your honor, I only stole a car once! I don't normally do that--I'm not a thief!").
I'll also say I found the last chapter to be a bit...unusual. This chapter was subtitled "The Post Rapture Chapter," with the target audience being the unfortunate 'left behind' humans made commonly known from the Tim LaHaye novels (see Premillennialism). My thoughts on this: I don't believe in the 'final judgement' being two final judgements, but if I did, I could think of better books the 'left behind' should bother themselves with instead of this one. The first would most certainly be a Bible. The second should probably be a wilderness survival guide... or maybe they should just skip that one too and be the first to break into their conservative Christian neighbor's house and raid the gun closet.
Okay, I had more negative stuff to say, but I don't think it would do any good. I'm not here to totally destroy this guy's effort. As I said earlier, the point of the book was to turn the eyes of Christians evermore to God. And that, by far, is an awesome goal (I'll even encourage Dr. Adams to write another book about it, seriously). I just disagree with the motivation. What I did agree with (and definitely like) about the book was his ninth chapter, "The Rewards." Regardless of our crude concepts about the totality of God, I think we can agree that a relationship with the God of everything is possible, and absolutely the best thing ever. Nothing compares with understanding that there is a God, that He is good and just, that He wants you to know who He is, and that He loves you so much He would die for you (He did). Sometimes (as in daily, if not hourly), us Christians take that for granted. I'm sure if we didn't, we'd all act a heck of a lot more like Jesus. But we get so self-absorbed, we don't always get it--and still God pursues us, like a man pursues the one he loves. No words, no matter how skillful, could capture the 'amazing-ness' of this reality.
As for Dr. Adams, I may not like his book, but I like his earnest passion for God, and I can definitely be encouraged by that.
Still haven't figured out how to put the little dash above the e, but I finished the resume (kind of an oxymoron). I didn't think it would take that long, but I'm generally satisfied. Now, all I have to do is get it checked, returned, rewrite it, find the 'sweet' jobs, send them out, talk nice to jerks, do some interviews, bargain for salary and benefits, and I'm in. It's like I'm practically there! Huzzah!
Now that I've been in Georgia about twelve days or so, I've been reflecting a bit on how I lived for the past three years in Kansas. It's pretty interesting, musing over the things that occurred, the people I met, and my responses to both.
If you get some time to read, consider reading this piece titled "U-Haul Theology," the cover story for the Fall 2008 ByFaith Magazine. In it, the author, Jim Hatch, talks about why moving is so painful and downright annoying. It's pretty good, and it's probably what preempted this post.
So... Kansas. I pause before I write here, because two things immediately come to mind: 1) Those three years marked some of the roughest times in my life, and 2) My responses and reactions to those times were not kind (to say the least), and I feel pretty disappointed in what my responses were. A lot of what went on there also had to do a lot with the Army, but for the sake of fairness, I think I'm going to split those into two different stories, and this one is for Kansas.
Okay... well, let me start by saying this: I've generally considered myself to be more prepared to move into different environments and cultures, as I've lived in about sixteen different places since I was born. I went to three different high schools, and the longest I've been anywhere in my life was at college (4 1/2 years), and that's where I generally consider to be my hometown. I could have never been more wrong in my assumption, actually. Moving to another location is always tough, and getting used to new cultures, with different societal beliefs, values, and norms, is pretty tricky. And looking back, I was certainly unprepared.
The majority of what I saw in Kansas relied on a few distinct changes from my comfort zone. The first which caught me was the geographical differences. Some spots of Kansas are absolutely beautiful, with gorgeous rolling hills and waving grass, and what my father-in-law calls the 'Missouri Breaks' (because of the movie with the same name). Trees, however, were few and far in between. It's also not recommended driving at sunrise and sundown, because of two big reasons: One, there's nothing to stop the sun from completely blinding you if you drive east or west, and two, half of the roads there run east-west.
And while I'm at it, people give directions completely different there! From what I've been accustomed to, directions are given by landmarks ("Do you know where the Quickie Mart is on that road? Well go two lights past it, take a right, and continue until the road forks, stay left, and you're looking for your third road on the left!"), and in Kansas, they're given as the crow flies ("So from here, head three blocks west, continue north until you get to the split, and from there head northeast for three block before turning north again!"). Make sure you bring a compass!
The second big thing was living in a college town. I've been to Athens (home of the UGA Bulldogs) on occasion, and I've seen some wild things done with red and black, but it doesn't come close to the amount of purple splayed on everything! Purple mailboxes, massive house murals, curb signs, dump trucks, polos... if you're not secure with purple, it can certainly be an adjustment! A lot of what happened in that town seemed to circle around college football and Army, neither of which I was really into at the time.
Thirdly, which I hesitate to talk about, was the difference in the church culture I was used to. I still can't really put my finger on what the exact difference was, but it was just slightly so that I felt uncomfortable most of the time in most of the churches I went to (I think six in all).
I think bouncing from church to church was one of the hardest things for me, as I was really needing to find a place to 'fit,' after not finding it in the Army nor in the college town, and it really drained a lot out of me to invest a bit, and then decide it was best to move on. And I think the more churches I went to, the more bitter and cynical I became in expecting to find what I was looking for.
What was I looking for? At the time, I probably would have said grace, or correct theology, or something sounding holy and just, but on recollection, I think I was really looking for Georgia in Kansas, and that's probably why I had such a hard time. I was expecting others to fit my culture, instead of learning where I was at, and adapting to it.
The power of Christ's love present in His Church is certainly amazing. It has the power to take down our walls and prejudices, and form bonds that are so much more significant and powerful than anything the world can concoct. I know this because I met some godly people there who were able to break through to me in all of that mess that I put up.
I would have so liked to say that my faith pulled me through those rough times, but it wasn't so. Like mentioned earlier, it's the object of our faith that saves us, not the quality or quantity of our faith. It's amazing how God gets to us, even after that first moment we realize that we've been reconciled to Him. He certainly is faithful, and I think without meeting the saints of Kansas in the predicament I was in, I would've missed out on one of the more significant lessons I've learned yet, the one that taught me I'm still a sinner, still desperately in need of Christ after all these years. And that won't change. There won't be a day in my life that I'll be good enough to not have to rely on God for my inherent shortcomings, of which there are many. And that God relentlessly pursues us, and absolutely nothing will keep Him from whom He loves. Not even themselves.
Well, if you happen to be one of thems in Kansas... thanks. Thanks for everything. I don't think I would be here without you, and I mean it. I'm still surprised at how much of me you put up with, but you did! I'm not sure if my path will ever wind through Kansas again, or if you'll ever be down by my way, but if so, I look forward to that day. If it doesn't happen in this world, we'll certainly meet up in New Jerusalem! When you get there, just head three blocks west, continue north until you get to the split, and from there head northeast for three block before turning north again... ;)
Don't be strangers! I love you guys, for real. Peace and grace to you all.
I don't mean literal Hebrews, by the way--I mean the letter to the Hebrews, between the memo to Mr. Philemon and the note from James. I've not buried my nose as much into this book as I have others, but I've been reading it lately and have become increasingly intrigued.
The author seems to not mince any words about the gravity of our relationship with God. Contained within we receive several stern warnings about 'falling away' and what happens to those who continue to blatantly sin after accepting the gospel (hint: It's not cheerful news).
I seem to have this problem of fixating on the bad things, and these warnings are what I think about when I think of Hebrews. But there's a whole chunk of awesome assurance that comes with it. The warnings that I mentioned above are hedged on both sides by how amazing Christ is, and how encouraged we should be because of it--something you'll definitely miss if you take it out of context.
For example, take the entirety of Hebrews 10 (which you can read up on here). It's an absolute gem of theology. I'd love to post it all, but that seems to be a waste of time on both our parts, so I'll just make a few quick notes on what caught my eye today:
Heb 10.14 - Jesus paid it all, all at once. He doesn't need to do it again. This was for those sins you're committing right now, and for the ones tomorrow, and the day after that, and so on... they've all been paid for.
Heb 10.19-24 - This is the answer to "So What Now?" that Christ has paid our ransom. "Let us" shows up three times to tell us to: 1)Draw near to God now that we are purified (because we can!), 2)Be completely assured that this can never be undone (because God is faithful--He won't ever break His word or undo His work), and 3)Encourage each other to love and to do good works and to keep meeting together despite the difficulty/persecution.
Heb 10.26-31 - Here's the warning about what happens if we keep sinning blatantly and without regard to the sacrifice that Jesus made. Don't let it trip you up, it gets better later in the chapter. What I understand of this warning is this: once I've turned to Christ for forgiveness, I've got nowhere else to go. If I decide to turn away, I'll go with knowledge that no other sacrifice or penitent action can redeem me, and "a fearful expectation of judgement (v27)" will begin to creep in.
Heb 10.32-39 - This notes that the warning isn't for the reader presently, and recalls the good works and incredible actions that occurred from their hands that was spawned by the Holy Spirit and of their faith. It reassures them that they are indeed the elect, that Christ's sacrifice was for them, and they need not be discouraged at all, because they aren't the type to give up something so monumental and permanent, and they can look forward to Christ's return.
Have you ever really not liked a certain music group, but had to make an exception for a song or two because it was so good? No?
Okay...well as a rule I don't really like Derek Webb, and I really don't like his off-again/on-again group Caedemon's Call. But there's a song that hasn't left my head for a couple of days, and it's got nowhere to go but out...so what better place for it to go than here?
The music, in particular, isn't that good. I don't think you could call it 'good' music by any standard (unless you use the crappy Christian Rock metric where it's cool to do cover number 22 of "Open the Eyes of My Heart, Lord," where each rendition was poppier and more resampled than the last), but the lyrics are downright awesome, and I could probably listen to it two (or maybe, maybe three) times in a row.
On further thought, a lot of the lyrics of his songs are pretty good, and pretty solid in the theological sense. They definitely make me think (read: repent). So, kudos to you, Derek! Keep up the rock (or folk, I suppose)!
There are days I don't believe the words I say
Like a life that I'm not living
A song that I'm not singing but to you
There are times that I believe I'm satisfied
Like an intimate connection
Despite this bad reception with you
Because I can't afford to pay
For most of what I say
So it's a lucky thing
That the truth's public domain
Chorus
And I am like a mockingbird
I've got no new song to sing
And I am like an amplifier
I just tell you what I've heard
Oh, I'm like a mockingbird
And yes, it's true that I need this more than you
Like one whose name is many
Have mercy, please don't send me away
And I'll do all I can
To be a better man
Oh I'll clean up this act
And be worse than we started
Chorus
-Mockingbird, by Derek Webb
