How we play The Game

Did you ever sit down to play a game, like Monopoly, with other people and get so caught up in the game that you forgot about everything else? Did you, or any of the people you played with, take it just a little too seriously? How about this…did anyone you ever played with surprise you by revealing a side you hadn't seen before, like being greedy or perhaps cheating?

It’s easy to get caught up in such things for some people. The game becomes their reality. It becomes a reflection of their ego. They seem to forget that it’s not ‘real’ life; that the stakes don’t really matter. What matters is how we play the game.

As a Christian, I have come to see life like that kind of game. I have come to believe that the ultimate reality is what we are being prepared for. I don’t mean to say that what goes on in this life is unimportant at all. I just mean that 25 million years from now the details of what happened in this life will be meaningless. Just think of our board game again. Chances are you may not remember any details of a particular game, but you may well remember if someone showed a greedy or cheating nature. This life is a kind a game, one that reveals our character. Some positions we land in are just luck of the draw or the throw of the dice. What we do once we're there is entirely a matter of our choice; a reflection of our character. It is the character that we develop here that will have lasting value in that ultimate reality.

It is a fact of our existence that our days on earth as mortals are numbered. We are all going to die some day. How one can really know that and still get worked up over how much stuff they’ve accumulated is beyond me? A popular bumper sticker declares that: “He who dies with the most toys wins!” Wins what??? It is a well-known truth that we can’t ‘take it with us’!

What we do take with us is the kind of people we have become. We take our character with us. If we’ve lived as honorable people or liars and cheats, it will go in our ‘permanent files’! If we have lived as people of faith or people who believed in nothing, I believe it will matter.

I’ve heard some non-believers declare that Christians just ‘must not be that bright’ for believing in something that’s little more than a fairy tale. None of it can be proven they say. They’re right, I can’t ‘prove’ what I believe is true. But, I’ve decided that, even if what I believe turns out to be completely meaningless, I still think it is the very best kind of life! I will have lived a life of faith, a life believing in something bigger than myself. I will have spent my life to try and become a better person and to help others become better people. I will have spent my energies learning to love. That’s surely a better life than one without purpose. And what good is a life devoted only to oneself??

I choose faith in God. I see proof of Him every time I open my eyes! And, I pity those that don’t. I try to see the big picture of what is going on here on earth. I realize that I'm nobody and nothing in the grandness of the universe. But, I believe, the very Creator of the universe knows my name. I feel humbled and exalted at the same time because of that. The older I get the more I realize just how short this existence really is. An inner voice declares that it all means something more; that what’s going on here will have lasting value.

What I believe is that Jesus the Christ conquered death by His resurrection and God holds out the promise of eternal life to me through His sacrifice. That is the hope that I live with.

To live a life of faith and hope and love…what could have more value than that?

Save the Baby Humans!

I’ve often heard it said that mankind must survive as a species, by colonizing other planets for example, otherwise what has all of human history been for? The achievements of our species, they say, would come to nothing if we ceased to exist.

To be sure, the accomplishments of our race have value. We’ve spent thousands of years climbing out of the darkness of ignorance. The arts, the literature, the technologies and the culture that we've striven so hard to develop…all of these have contributed to the betterment of human life. To see value only in what we have accomplished as a species, however, is to ignore the value of individuals. I think that’s the wrong way to view what’s going on here on earth.

Traditional human wisdom from many cultures recognizes that it is not the man who conquers a thousand cities that is superior, it is the man who has conquered himself. That’s a recognition of what has real value.

Every human life has value. Every human being is a child of God. What God values isn’t what we’ve accomplished as a species, it’s how we have grown as His children. The true value of mankind is not what we have accomplished as a race, it’s what we’ve accomplished as individuals.

Virtually every religion on earth has some concept of laws that the universe runs by. If we live in harmony with those laws we are in harmony with the creation. If we choose to disobey those laws…we are outside of that harmony and we risk harm to ourselves and each other.

Eastern philosophies, like Buddhism, teach that consciousness is a fundamental energy in the universe. What we choose to do affects the world around us. The scriptures teach us that our obedience to Gods law, or lack thereof, is connected to the fabric of time and space in a similar way. If we sin, disobey the laws of God, even the world around us suffers. Every human life is connected to the universe. Every human life is woven into the fabric of time and space.

The universe exists to create life. The purpose of life is growth, in consciousness and in character. To grow, we must make the right choices. We, as sentient beings, have free will. We have choice. The message of the scriptures is that we can live any way we choose. But, if we want to grow into healthy and happy individuals, and live in a healthy, happy society, we need to choose the way our Creator instructs. If we are to be deemed worthy of eternal life we must yeild to His will. God revealed His laws to us for our own good. He doesn’t send and angel down to slam us into the ground if we choose to jump off a high building. If we ignore the law gravity, our disregard of that law harms us. Spiritual laws work the same way. If we choose to disobey them, it is our own disobedience that is out of harmony with creation and that harms us.

Ultimately our growth comes from the choices we make. It is within our power to decide what is most important to us and what we will devote our energies to. Every sentient being has that right. God gave us free will so we can choose. He then asks us to choose life... That makes every human life important.

The Pull of Islam

Even after all the acts of terrorism committed by Muslims in the last few decades, Islam is still the fastest growing religion in the world. Our knee-jerk response to a terrorist attack might be to condemn all Muslims. That would be wrong. Many Muslims are decent, upstanding people that try to make their corner of the world a better place. I know Muslims that I respect as decent people. What they have maintained is something too many Christians have forgotten...a strong sense of right and wrong.

Individuals most often are the face of a religion to non-believers. Christian martyrs were responsible for the world taking notice of the faith, and for the conversion of many, many people. Unfortunately, in our time, Christianity has become so filled with paganism and so watered down as to bear little resemblance to the faith once delivered. Christian churches and their ministers have adopted so many of the worlds values that the church is almost indistinguishable from the world. They've made the faith appear to be a joke to many non-believers. Modern Christianity has failed to do what ‘the faith once delivered’ did. There are people calling themselves ‘Christians’ with little to no moral values. The message this sends the world is that the faith is no better than a collection of myths filled with hypocrisy. That's far from the light to the world it was intended to be.

In our modern world we have adopted a kind of ‘anything goes’ philosophy. Moral relativism, the ‘buzz word’ of the day, says there is no ultimate right and wrong. It says that those are relative values determined by time and place; every culture is different. This can leave honest people, who sincerely seek the right way to live, feeling empty and without purpose. This attitude has even crept into Christian churches, infecting them with a sense of moral ambiguity. They removed the Ten Commandments from their pulpits long before the ACLU began removing them from government buildings.

Islam appeals to many people because of the failure of Christianity to live up to its true purpose. The very first words Christ is recorded to have uttered when He began His ministry are: “Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand!” Repentance is to return to obedience to God. That’s a message that has been lost by Christians trying to fit in to a world without a moral center.

Islam has some measure of righteousness, where much of the Western world has none. Islam often appears to be uncompromising in its moral code in many ways. The way of Islam is submission to 'The God'. (Al = the, Lah = god) The faithful of Islam live by a strict religious code that demands that submission. Right and wrong are moral certainties. To a world without a moral code, that certainty can be very appealing.

Unfortunately many ‘Christian’ churches that offer some kind of moral certainty are actually cults. Cults tend to focus on their leaders and their own agendas more so than Gods. They tend to pick and choose their list of do’s and don’ts from the Biblical tradition and strictly enforce them, while missing the bigger picture of the message of the Gospel.

Many mainstream ‘ministries’ have removed the less palatable parts of the Gospel to try and appeal to more people. The result is a gospel devoid of any real meaning other than some ambiguous emotional appeal. The message of Jesus the Christ was meant to bring people back to the knowledge of, and obedience to the one true God.

When looking for the reason why Islam’s growth is on the rise…Christians should look first to their own failures. The world needs the Gospel of Jesus the Christ now more than ever. We’ve lost our way because we follow our own desires and deny that there is an ultimate code of right and wrong…and it’s found in the pages of the Bible.

Instead of putting the Ten Commandments out of public view in more and more places, we should be putting them in every public square, every school, every church and every government office in the land.

We should be writing them on the tables of our hearts….

Reaching out...

An interesting thing sometimes happens to people who work in the healing professions. They often find themselves attuned to people’s pain. It’s a kind of empathy that allows them to enter into the feelings other people have to find the best way to help them. When it happens to those in the mental health field another thing sometimes happens as well. They start to see pain everywhere…

Most of us have some level of empathy towards others in physical pain. If we were to encounter someone who say, had a motorcycle accident and had an open leg wound a femur was sticking out of, the sight would be so horrific to us that we would experience a level of shock ourselves. Those of us so inclined might try to stop the bleeding and treat for shock. Most people would certainly call for help. In the mental health field things aren’t quite so clear.

We encounter people every day who have open wounds to their psyches. Instead of ‘stopping the bleeding’, treating for shock or even calling for help, we most often just expect them to straighten up! Wounds go unnoticed and untreated, they scar over and they continue to cause pain. Such pain is everywhere.

The sad fact is that often the only thing needed to treat such pain is the simple recognition of it. If we could see the pain that others are in we might not be so quick to expect them to simply straighten up. We might begin to develop a level of empathy towards them. That empathy can be just the recognition of someone else’s pain that they need to begin to heal. Unlike physical pain, sometimes just the witness…the testimony of our troubles to another human being can be all that it takes to begin the healing process.

We often refer to some unseen pain as ‘emotional baggage’. We sense it sometimes in the form of defense mechanisms or rationalizations. Sometimes no one sees it until it manifests itself in the form suicide or violence towards others. There are all kinds of wounds to the psyche. They manifest themselves in all kinds of ways. And they are all around us.

Perhaps, if we could take some time in our lives to put our own problems and concerns aside and begin to notice the wounds other people carry, our world would begin to change. Forgetting our own problems and helping someone else with theirs can begin the healing in two people. It's called outgoing concern, and it has the power to heal wounds there aren't even words for.

Christians will know it by another name...Love.