Thursday, May 29, 2014

May Mingle: Adam - Theology, Board Games, and Life

Adam is my final May Mingle guest. I met Adam in college and although I wasn't his biggest fan in the beginning, he obviously won me over because I said yes when he asked me to marry him. I love AND respect him and I am so grateful he did a guest blog for all of you.

You can find more from his blog here.

Theology, Board Games, and Life

When Krista asked me to do a guest blog, she wanted me to write about myself, but also write about my blog so others know what I normally write about. So what you are really going to get here is three blogs in one. Sorta like an example of the Trinity. BAM! Theology! So here is Theology, Board Games, and Life sneak peak on Joy in the Journey.

Theology
The most impactful philosophical decision you make is if you believe in absolute truth. You see this decision drives how you live your life, how you see your life, how you see the lives of others. I've been thinking a lot about this recently. With everything that is constantly in the news like homosexual marriages, abortion, Ukraine, wars or potential wars, slaughter in Sudan, human trafficking, legalizing marijuana, and a host of other topics.
Whether you see all these things as morally bad, just bad, or just fine or morally good is not what I want you to think about right now. What I want you to think about is WHY they are that. Why is human trafficking bad? Why is a homosexual relationship okay? The answer lies in what you think about absolute truth. You see if there is not an objective maker of truth, than your answer for what makes genocide wrong depends on who you ask. This means that the value of human life depends upon who you ask and what century you ask them in.
However, if we take the view of absolute truth then the answer is the same today for me as it is 200 years from now for you. The moral values do not change according to who wins a war, is in power currently in government, or makes the decisions in our world. You see, the problem with not adhering to absolute truth is that carrying the logic fully out it is okay to kill 2 year olds if you won’t want them or marry 12 year olds or subdue millions, just so long as it is culturally acceptable to do so.
So if we take this further, if truth is absolute, somehow it has to be made absolute by something outside human decision. That objective maker of truth, I believe, is Jesus Christ and he proclaims his unchanging nature and thus unchanging truth in Hebrews 13:8: Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever! This gets personal for me, because I then see that I’m not just some animal whose value wanes, that my kids and my wife, and those people I interact with on a regular basis have real value and don’t just have value because the current culture I live in say they do. This then challenges me to show their value to me.

Board Games
Whew! Writing about theology is taxing and thought provoking, which is probably why writing about board games happens more often on my blogs. It is just easier and less controversial and I have to worry less about saying the wrong thing. I’m going to stereotype right now and assume that most of the readers here are female and also mothers, since a lot of what Krista writes about has to do with those two demographics. So for board games, I’d like to say play them! Board games are such an excellent hobby to do with your family for many reasons, but I’ll try and break it down quickly.
1.       They are really quite cheap. I mean you can spend $40 on a cool hobby board game now, but compare that to going to a movie. If you take a family of four to a movie, then it is at least $32 (that is if you get $8 tickets) plus any refreshments you get for 2 hours of entertainment. With boarding though, you get to keep that entertainment and do it again and again and then you can even sell it later and recoup some of your money.
2.       It allows for family time without a screen. As a husband I really love it that my wife and my kids play games with me. We play them, have a great time (because they aren't the usual boring and non-thinking games of Monopoly and Life), while learning and stretching our minds.
3.       Not sure why I made this a list, but for number 3, I want to at least suggest some games to check out. Try out Takenoko, which is a game about a panda and a gardener.  Try out Ticket to Ride, which is a game about building trains across the USA. Try out King of Tokyo, which is a game about monsters attacking Tokyo. All of these are awesome games.

Life
There are a lot of things to write about life, but I think I don’t realize it until I write it. Most often when I post about life, it is about my family I've found or things we do together. I recently went to a convention for 4 days and that is when you realize what you miss in life, which is family. Just talking on FaceTime once a day isn't enough time to see them and only having the digital screen is not exactly cuddly. Life is the people you interact with whether going through tough times, missing them while you are away, or having a fun night playing board games or watching a movie. It was so great coming home from that convention, taking the next day off of work, and having the joy of my little girls run into the bedroom in the morning and climb up with kisses and hugs so excited to see me. That is life.


Oh. Yeah. I wanted to leave you with my favorite joke. What does a duck and tricycle have in common? They both have wheels…except for the duck!

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