“Gaming in Faith” by Craig Gehlhausen
I’m about to share a secret of my life that few people at St. Isidore know. Those who do know are a handful of students and Core Team members in the Youth Ministry programs.
There I said it and I’m proud of it! Now the world knows that I sit in my house and whenever I get free time, which doesn’t happen often anymore, I play video games. My game of choice is Minecraft.
For those who haven’t heard of Minecraft, think of Legos but a computer game. In Minecraft there are two main options to play, you can completely create your own world from scratch and have every block in the game at your disposal to do so, or you can play in survival and will have to work to create the blocks that you want to build with. You can play a single game of Minecraft for years just continuously adding more and more to your world. Creating a world that you want to create with little to no limits on your creative. My longest created world is about 5 years old.
I enjoy playing Minecraft so much that I tend to watch other people play the game on Youtube. Now I know what your thinking, Craig you just went from kind of cool to super weird in one sentence, but hear me out. If you are big into basketball, you are gonna try and watch as much basketball as you can. When we truly love something, be that a sport or certain topic, we dive head first into and try to learn as much as we can about it to be better. Minecraft is the same for me. I watch people whose full time job is to play Minecraft and record it for others to watch. I watch because it’s entertaining to me, but I mostly watch to pick up tips in my own world. To make MY world seem more real. (this world is about 6 months old)
I tend to watch one person, FWHIP, on Youtube just about every single Wednesday, as he plays live and interacts with those watching. Every single week, without fail, someone in the chat always asks how to become a better builder. Fwhip does his best to hide his true feelings about this question but he is getting to the point of annoyance because it is constantly being asked. His response is always the same. “If you want to be a better builder, you have to build.” In order to be better at playing Minecraft, you have to play Minecraft more.
The same can be said for our faith. A deep faith isn’t something that you just get after an amazing experience with God. It’s something that you have to continuously work for. We have to spend time praying before we really feel like our prayer is where we want it to be. If we want to have a truly deep, meaningful relationship with Jesus, we have to start creating it. Jesus is waiting for us. He is longing for us. And although He always makes the first move, He is waiting for us to respond to it. Although God tells us to “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” Matthew 7:7; we have to move.
Our desire to dive deeper in our faith takes an action from us. We have to be willing to put in the time in order to grow in faith. I once read a couple years ago a saying that has since stuck with me: We will never FIND time to pray, we have to MAKE time. If we are waiting to find time to develop our prayer life or faith we will ALWAYS find time for other things to take up that time. We have to make time for our faith, in all aspects of our life. It only takes a couple minutes a day to start. So why wait? Start today.
