It's a new year people!
This blog felt like it wasn't going to happen, going round and round about what to write about in the first post of the new year. After plenty of thinking and pray I have decided to take a moment to get more personal with my thoughts and where I see 2019 going.
Over the course of 2018, the continual growth of my faith has impacted my thought processes and in turn has affected how I view my hobby in gaming.
I often find that current cultural awareness and my own social shortcomings make it hard for me to talk directly and openly about my beliefs. Looking at it objectively I find it funny that it is easier for me to nerd out over board games then it is for me to talk about how God has affected my life in the past couple years.
Life events and hard truths coming to the surface at the end of 2016 into early 2017 caused me to take a deeper look at my life. I fully believe that God created humans with a hole within them, then he set us upon the world with free will. We would choose how to fill that hole. We misdirect ourselves to the material to meet that need. Money, power, sex, hobbies. I look back at how heavy I was into my hobby, but without Jesus in my life that was my replacement for everything. It began to speak louder to how I had neglected my marriage and my wife.
I won't delve too deeply into details, needless to say, over time our marriage had become broken and disillusioned. We weren't talking through issues and were assuming a lot of one another without discussing it. I placed all my energies into my hobby, making that the love of my life instead.
Through a series of events in early 2017:
An abortive attempt at counselling from my parent's pastor.
A mechanic detailing my marriage into a triangle with God at the peak.
Being urged to undertake the 30 day challenge, in which you listen to christian music for a month.
A failed promotion attempt at work, impacted by my own emotional state.
Through all this I was led to get myself back to church, and a friend who I had made through gaming also happened to be the son-in-law of a pastor at a local church. I went with an open heart and a mind to listen.
Now, it's not like I didn't already consider myself a christian. I had spent my late-teens in churches in the UK with my parents. I had been baptized in Phoenix, AZ in the late 90's after my brush with cancer. The wife & I had attended a few different churches in Arizona since arriving, but nothing would stick. My walk gradually moved apart from Jesus. I had checked him off my list, thinking I was good to go. Much like the reason I had a mechanic talking to me, I had failed to maintain my life. Not up keeping the spiritual oil had caused my life to corrode on the inside.
So there I was finally in a position to treat going to church seriously and I had a place picked out. Amazingly at this new church they also had a marriage school that was starting out. Over the rest of 2017 I began to take a good look back, looking at all these small details, these coincidences, pushing myself and my wife on a journey. A journey that is obscured to you until you take that step back and look at it from God's view. Seeing all the falling dominoes in our lives that had led us to that breaking point and what God had prepared for us to help mend the broken parts. Not coincidences anymore, just the path that led us to the right place.
Almost two years later now, and I am stepping up in marriage school. Offering to help lead teaching. Which is a huge step for me. Deep down it is definitely something I'm not fully comfortable with, but I honestly feel this is an opportunity to give back and share. Share the joy and hope I've felt through the process.
This is a culmination of my prayers in regards to the direction my life is to take. As to what is my place in God's plan. What is His purpose for me?
How does this cycle back to gaming? In the past I think I was using my hobbies as my escape. A selfish tool to forget my own problems. Now I want to concentrate on the outreach aspects of gaming, sharing this hobby and the relationships I have found through it.
The amazing church family I have found has a message. Live, Love and Share. Live like Jesus, Love like Jesus and Share his message everywhere you go. I want to be able to show the love He has shown me to others around me. I am feeling called into a form of leadership or even ministry, and my knowledge/love of gaming could allow me to use that as a tool.
Even in this, an area I am very comfortable in, I still have my own anxieties and fears. I find myself reminded that God has often used people who were themselves reluctant, nervous and broken. Even a great leader like Moses, as God asked him to go speak to the Pharaoh and demand the release of the Israelites. Moses asked who he was to be given such a task. God simply replied "I will be with you."
So as 2018 closes and I reflect. I see it as a year I began to find balance and comfort in my faith. I look into 2019 and have hopes that it will be a year I push away my social anxieties and take the reins.
