Between the Panels

Class in my faith? I must have missed that chapter in the Bible! No, you haven't missed anything dear reader.  I want to give you a different vantage point on something that is not always talked about: spiritual disciplines .  As a teen, I was given the book Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster as a way of developing more in my personal time with God.  To this day, it is one of my favourite resources to come back to when I feel like things are getting a bit stale in how I am spending time with God. This book covers 12 different spiritual disciplines ( meditation, prayer, fasting, study, simplicity, solitude, submission, service, confession, worship, guidance, and celebration ) as ways to connect with God.  Often, we have a couple of practices that we naturally lean toward, but it is good to at least try out another discipline to sometimes gain a new appreciation/vantage point with God. Just as your connection with someone may change in it's expression over ti...

From the very start of my D&D gaming/roleplaying career, Wisdom has always been a very important player statistic for me to invest in my characters.  I could be playing a Barbarian (who is all about Strength and Constitution btw) and I will almost always strive to make his Wisdom on par or better than his main stats. Why does wisdom matter in a game setting like D&D? How do you even use it? Excellent questions, my inquisitive reader or listener of our podcast 😉. In short, wisdom is about seeing the environment around yourself or other players and knowing how to best address it. Related skills under the wisdom stat are: animal handling, insight, medicine, perception, and survival. This differs from Intelligence which tends to be focused on facts or Charisma that focuses on your contribution to the environment around you. Wisdom is a bit passive, but it's actively looking for things that can help your adventure party in a bind to react well or to process intentions of other...

Don’t you wish you could have everything in life organized in priority and immediacy? Admittedly, this is one thing that I think video games/role-playing games does well.  Typically, when you are pausing after finishing a big quest or are in the break of the story; you are brought to your quest menu .  The quest menu is so helpful not just seeing what you have accomplished (getting that pat on the back), but seeing whether it is a main plot task or a side quest.  Along with that, there are sometimes promptings of events that you can jump into immediately to find impressive loot or a level up for your character. However, if you didn’t have this menu to navigate through or prioritize what quests you are taking, you might just aimlessly go around not making as much progress. It helps to be organized and to be able to go into the game with a plan and an intentional goal for your character to grow in their journey. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? Jesus actually has something that ...

Gamers, particularly ones who like to play RPG s ( Role Playing Games ), know that there is a legitimate struggle between focusing on the main story and wanting to do side quests/missions . Everyone gets the game for the main story and works toward its conclusion. Though, side quests are sometimes more fun than focusing on the main story, especially when you are struggling at a certain points. Take me for example. I love the Batman Arkham series games and have played through 3/4 of them in their completion.  However, in Batman: Arkham Knight , I have been getting distracted with side quests that I have left the main story for now years (this is in part because of not gaming by myself lately).  Part of it was the struggle of fighting major bosses, but also there have been some fun side quests with other characters that I love to interact with.  This is all to say that completing side quests and focusing on them for a while is not bad; they are part of getting things done ...

One of my favourite games to get into is Kingdom of Amalur Reckoning for several reasons. First, the art work is done by an amazing comic artist (Todd McFarlane). Second it's an open world RPG (role-playing game, one of my favourite genres). Lastly, there is a Tree of Fate that shows your character's progression in abilities/skills for game play (becoming a rogue, warrior, mage, ect.)  I love that kind of customizability with characters in games like that; it challenges you to have a plan for what you want your character to become as you guide them in this fantasy world.  What I love even more is that your character in the game is called a Fate Weaver in different interactions because it's your actions that can change the fate of the game.  So cool! Is this really any different than the way we are approaching our relationship with God?  I have said before that life is like a giant RPG in preparation for our real life (eternity). But if that's the case is God the on...

If you are into Role-Playing Games (RPGs), you most likely have heard the phrase " Make a perception check! " from your Game Master's mouth.  For those of you who are not accustomed to this phrase, allow me to explain. A perception check in these types of games are for your character to be able to assess what is going on around them.  This is likely to see if there are any threats that might be an issue or to get a better understanding of what is going on in the environment around the player. It is often used to try and find details in the world so that the player is able to advance not just themselves, but their team on quests. How does this connect to the Bible you may ask? When we read about Jesus in His ministry, there are these strange moments where he would reveal a great truth to the crowd around him, but it was in the form of parables (stories with a lesson in them). In Matthew 13:9 Jesus shares a parable and follows it up by saying, " Anyone with ears to he...

Sword Art Online is amazing and here is why! This anime demonstrates how we should be looking at life through the lens of eternity.  Confused? Allow me to clarify if you have not seen it yet.  A new game, Sword Art Online (SAO), that is a fully immersive Role Playing Game (RPG) has just been released and gamers are checking it out.  However, they are not able to exit the game.  As it turns out they are locked in and the only way to escape is to beat the game to get back to the real world. Oh and if they die in the game, they die in the real world... (bum bum BUUUUUUUMMMM!!!!!) So the goal is clear: to beat all the levels and make it to the end of the game. How does this relate to our life/faith you may ask? If you look in the Bible there is the constant struggle of being too focused on what is happening around you in life that you can forget what I like to call The Eternal Reality . Jesus gave a reminder that it is God that can destroy not just the body, but the soul...

Now you may be looking at this and say to yourself..."What on earth is this thing?" This my friend is a 20 sided die or more often called a "D20" within the nerd world.  A D20 can be used in a variety of ways, but its most common use is determining if a character makes a successful action during a role-play game. For example: If you were a character in a game and you wanted to see if you could lift a heavy object (say a table), you would have to roll a D20 to determine how well or poorly you do this. And if you do very poorly there might be some consequences to your decision (character might get injured). In life we may not be making decisions or determine how well we do something via a dice roll, but we do feel the sting of failure.  Everyday can feel like we are constantly being asked to roll the die to see how well our efforts impact the world around us.  However, the Bible says that we are already at a failing roll or a critical fail (Romans 3:23) and that impac...