The Focus and the Call
When you are a Christian like me you get used to things adding up, making sense. To those weird seemingly unrelated juxtapositions of life that suddenly resonate in ways that no one else can fathom except you, the things amidst everyday life that are the voice of God speaking to you.
At the beginning of 2004 I took a really big step for me, I gave up playing computer games. For me that was a big thing. They had been a part of my life in one way or another since I was a teenager. From waiting for 14 and a half minutes for beachhead to load from tape on a Commodore 64 to many hours playing Warcraft 3 I played nearly every day, and certainly every week I had access to a computer. I remember playing Civilization for 14 hours straight one night after being turned down when I asked someone on a date sometime in the early 90s. Two and a half years ago when Pastor Mark was talking about sacrifice I knew they had to go. The time they were taking and the sleep I was losing had to be put to better uses and there was only one way that was going to happen: cold turkey. I could have kidded myself that I could “just play for half an hour” one more time but I had failed so often I knew that was a lie. Goodbye, time to make a change, my focus needed to be on the things of God and games were robbing me of my destiny.
Yesterday I was talking to Gordo at work and the topic got around to the subject of games. As we were talking I could feel the allure, the attraction, the call. The desire to bury myself in pure mental calculation and shut out anything and everything in the world around me, to exist in the world of the game and nowhere else. It was strong, I could see it in myself, I remembered what it was like, it was attractive and, once again, I had to recognise the desire in myself and step back from the slope, the slide backwards away from my destiny.
Last night I went to the Thirty Something prayer meeting up at church (awesome prayer meeting BTW) and Pastor Mark was talking about being seduced away from God’s best. The slow drift that starts with a single step, not very far, towards the call of something other than God and away from Him, shutting out the sound of His voice for a moment, only a moment. The step that leads to another and another. We were praying for people who had begun that journey, that God would arrest that walk and make them realise just what was going on and what was happening.
Thinking about my conversation earlier in the day I realised that I am not so very far from starting that journey every day that I live in this fallen world, that I need to be attuned to the voice of my Father at every moment lest I stray from the narrow path laid out for me that leads to my eternity with Him.
