How God Is

On Thursday, my family and I drove up to Columbus, Ohio, to meet up with a friend of mine from my Carnegie Mellon University days back in the early ’80s. That’s a long time to know someone, but old friends are often the best friends of all. The last time Bob and I got together in person was at my wedding 13 years ago, so it has been awhile. Still, we have kept up by phone, email, and now Facebook.

The crux of our getting together this time was another wedding, his. Though we were not able to make the ceremony, as we do not travel well at this time, I was relieved that he and bride Christin would be only two hours away as part of their honeymoon. That WAS doable.

What I didn’t realize until the morning of the meeting was that Bob and Christian were attending the Origins Gaming Fair, the big convention for fans of role-playing games, boardgames, military strategy games, and…well, most any kind of game out there. I’ve never seen so many gaming fans together in one place. Our son was with us, and I knew he would eat up all the fun stuff going in within the many rooms of the convention center, and indeed, we had a blast.

But it wasn’t on the convention floor that I was most blessed.

As it was a meeting to celebrate a wedding, we brought a gift. I thought about that gift a long time and was able to find exactly what I was looking for to give to Bob and Christin. When we met, they were waiting there with a gift in their hands, too, something I did not expect.

Bob asked me to open the bag—inside was something very special.

When I was still in my youth, my brothers and I had a copy of an aerial combat game called Ace of Aces. By using an innovative game mechanic, two people with the small, paired, illustrated books of maneuvers could participate in a real-time dogfight. The game was brilliantly simple, and I loved playing it. And if I loved it, I knew my son would, too.

Sadly, though it was highly regarded, the many Ace of Aces variants are all out of print. Copies sold online command very high prices. I know; I checked. It seemed to me that my son and I would have to pass up playing this game together.

When I opened up the gift bag from Bob and Christin, I found a copy of Ace of Aces. It had been the copy that Bob and his son (now an adult) had played. I couldn’t believe it.

Walking back to my car to safely stow this wonderful gift, I got a tear in my eye. I kept thinking that this is how God is with us. We seek to bless Him, but what He blesses us with in response is much more than we can imagine. Just as my friend had been paying attention to a comment I made on Facebook about searching for this game, God hears us and plans great things for our pleasure, because He loves us so very much.

God cares about our needs, but He also cares about our joy. A little game I can play with my son may not seem like an earthshattering thing, but its an example of God’s goodness in even the smallest things.

After we left Bob and Christin, we met up with a Cerulean Sanctum supporter, Travis, one of the longest-running readers of this blog, A gift from God, one of millions... and someone I had not had the pleasure of meeting face to face. We ate together in a nearly deserted Bob Evans, and we talked about his new daughter. Just some regular folks hanging out and talking about life. Driving home, my family and I saw a rainbow. Last night, we watched two baby finches, whose nest was in our hanging fern outside, take their first flights and disappear into our woods. On a sweltering evening, we felt the first cool breezes of an oncoming nightfall before the stars came out thick and bright, the Milky Way lighting up the sky.

God cares about us and shows it in a million little ways each day. My prayer is that you can find the time to exult in those blessings and realize how much you are loved.

Be blessed and cultivate joy. It’s all around you.

Dying of Thirst in the New Social Desert

My neighbor told me a few weeks ago that he bought his fifth-grade son a cell phone. As my neighbor is a bit of a Luddite and has resisted such things in the past, I was surprised. What surprised me more was his reasoning, which was nowhere on my radar screen.

Seems he bought the phone because his popular son had seen that popularity dwindle to zero. And that sudden dive was strictly because the son was out of the texting loop. No cell phone meant no connection to the social structure of today’s tweens and teens. In reality, the boy had ceased to exist.

This last year has seen a sea change in social connection here at the Edelen household:

1. A Christian small group we were a part of for eight years ceased to exist. One by one, families dropped out until there were just two, each unsure what to do going forward. That group now no longer meets.

2. Another Christian small group we are a part of has now decided not to meet during the summer. That it also seems not to meet during the winter holidays means it’s meeting only half the year now. Given that scheduled meetings are only twice a month anyway, that translates into about a dozen meetings a year total.

3. The writers group I am a part of has had its meeting schedule disrupted from the last Monday of each month to whenever we have enough submission work to warrant a meeting. The meetings have grown more and more sporadic as a result.

4. The worship team at my church attempted a regular practice schedule, but work responsibilities, involvement in outside sporting events for children, and on and on have translated into two practices in the last six months.

5. The Audubon group I’m a part of (as treasurer) had no scheduled events for spring and nothing scheduled so far for summer, the first time that has happened that I can recall.

The irony of all this is that many of the people in the groups mentioned above have joined Facebook in the last six months. We seem to have no trouble meeting in cyberspace.

I know that I’m kind of a crank on this subject, but do a handful of less than a hundred word comments on Facebook constitute social connection?

We all know this passage:

And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.
—Hebrews 10:24-25

I can’t read that passage and not shake my head. We seem to be becoming the some mentioned, the ones we are cautioned against.

When an 11-year-old boy vanishes from the social network of an elementary school for no other reason than his lack of a cell phone, something is horribly wrong. When we begin to retreat into electronic worlds, abandoning the real one, we have, perhaps, reached that point of no return.

A child who merely wishes to put together a game of Kick the Can finds no playmates in the real world. Either the play is regimented according to schedule (organized kids sports) or relegated to an online world (Neopets, Webkins, et al.). Without a cell phone, even a child becomes a non-entity.

In recent days, I have considered seriously whether to begin extricating myself from the online system. While that will effectively make me invisible in today’s world, I wonder how much more of this we can take before we are no longer a society. If most communities go from face to face to virtual, I believe we will lose the very cues by which we understand each other.

Yet some are preferring this distant means of interacting. Tweet me, baby.

I don’t believe the new thing is better. While it may serve some basic purpose in communicating brief bursts of info, those brief bursts are increasingly ousting the longer forms of communication that define us as human beings. We are preferring them to meeting together face to face. We no longer assemble.

Our faith in rapid bits of impersonal communication may very well be creating a new social desert. Twitter’s 140 characters cannot replace genuine interaction, though, despite how much some laud it.

I don’t have an answer for this. My thoughts on the subject swim against an increasingly powerful stream that is sucking everyone in. Going against the flow means becoming even less “connected,” even if that connection is all smoke and mirrors anyway. At least a mirror reflects something, even if it’s just an illusion.

You’d think the Church in America would have something to say about this. It has: satellite churches that beam the televised service to different substation halls. And people are eating that up. Rather than getting together during the week, some Christians prefer to connect online. So much for the real definition behind assembling.

Our society is already at that “every man for himself” stage. If we lose what little genuine community we still have, I don’t see how that will ever turn around.

Who Is My Neighbor? (Community & Economics Edition)

We watched the penultimate teaching from The Truth Project this evening at church. It dealt with labor.

I found it a good teaching, showing that work can be a joy because God Himself took joy in His work. Best of all, the teaching touched on the need for Christians to support the arts and those skilled in various kinds of work.

If you’ve read here any length of time, you know I talk at great length about the intersection of Christianity and work, and definitely NOT in the traditional evangelical vein of seeing that intersection as little more than working hard to please God and starting a workplace Bible study. I try to tackle tougher issues, like economic justice issues and their impact on community.

After we convened in the café to discuss the teaching, I told my wife I would keep quiet, even though I have a great deal to say on this subject. 😉 I was facing a work-related issue even as I sat there, so I knew it would be difficult.

Twenty minutes went by.

I don’t remember exactly what triggered my silence failure, but I raised my hand to ask if I could demonstrate what I was going to say. The discussion leader looked at me and nodded.

I walked over to the wall of the café where there was a “painting” and asked folks to imagine that I was the painter who had painted that artwork with my God-ordained gift, using the art supplies and tools I’d purchased, and devoting the cost of my labor to its creation. The pricetag was $200. Now, I also asked them to imagine that some factory in China was spewing out “art” that closely resembled mine for a cost of $20. My question: Which fellow brother and sister in Christ would buy my artwork for $200, thus supporting my God-given talent, while also keeping money within the community (and not only the local community, but the community of saints)?

One of the major points in the teaching was that people are finding less satisfaction in their work. I believe what I illustrated explains why—and much more.

Imagine that you come home to your house, which was built by the man down the street. Something your neighbor raised? You open the front door, which was fashioned by the local carpenter. You hang up the coat your mother made, then sit down at the table your next-door neighbor crafted. The plates you take out of the pantry—made by the couple around the corner—will be filled with the vegetables your farmer neighbor grew.

I look at my own home and it is filled with cheap stuff made in China that ultimately has no connection to anyone I know. It possesses no genuine community, no memories of its creator, no ties to people I see every day. And for this reason, my local community is robbed of connection.

Worse, though I claim to be a Christian who honors artisans using their God-given talents within their holy work, when was the last time I relied on someone from my church for…well, anything? Is there even one item I own that has some connection to a Christian I know?

If we want to explain why so many people feel their work lacks meaning, what better explanation than the things we produce have no connection to us or to the people who buy them? In our race to the cost bottom, have we forgotten that buying goods and services our neighbors create/raise/grow fosters community?

If the food I buy in the grocery store comes from Vietnam, and my dying to save a couple bucks puts my farmer neighbor out of business, what then is the cost to me and to my community now that he’s now without a job? Was anything gained? Or was everything lost?

To say that I was floored when folks tried to argue “well, that’s just the way it is” is an understatement. As if not one single thing we can do as Christians can fight that trend! How impotent have we become? I even heard justification for consumerism as a way to get the Gospel out to foreign lands. (Needless to say, I did not ask if getting the Gospel out to the world was worth excusing the slave trade, but then again, I’m not fond of being stoned to death by my fellows.)

How can we truly call ourselves the countercultural example to worldliness if we just shrug on this issue and claim there’s nothing we can do? How in the heck can we say with a straight face that we’re concerned about our neighbor if we refuse to buy his goods and services? How can I say that the Gospel went out because I bought some piece of crap from China, while ignoring the quality item my neighbor sold before he ended up in the breadline? What does my neighbor think of such a “gospel” when his house gets swallowed in foreclosure?

I’m not immune, either. I fail like everyone on this. I don’t always know where all my stuff comes from. But honestly, the question nags at me. (And not just because run a small farm, either.) I think at least some of the mess we’re in economically is because of our failure to deal with this very question. And I also know that the life-robbing disconnection that so many of us feel is due, in part, because the things we buy have little or nothing to do with our neighbor. Nothing in our work ties us together in mutual enterprise.

Later that evening I came home to talk with a friend about a work issue. In the process of conversation, I found out that her company farms out its document proofreading and editing to India. I laughed, especially considering my impassioned plea at church just minutes before. But trust me, that guffaw wasn’t a hearty one.