Shooting for God

I love video games. I have spent most of my life playing games of some sort. It started in grade school playing oregon trial on the apple IIe at school and hunt the wumpas on the TI 99 4a at home. My neighbor had an odyssey and an atari 2600 that we played on and family friends had a commodore 64, a coleco vision and an intelevision. I had games on every computer I have ever had, from might and magic on my 286 to wolfenstein and vga planets on my 486 in college all the way up to half life and unreal on the pentium 4. Of course I played my share of arcade games also mainly wasting quarters on dig dug, icari warriors, 1942 and 720.

As far as consoles go, different friends had nintendo's (nes) and I played my share of the mario games but didn't get my own until after I was married. I owned an NES, super nintendo, sega dreamcast, N64, xbox, xbox 360 and now a wii.

What does this have to do with anything? Well a group of us have been getting together for years to play halo, first locally on the xbox (4 tv's and 4 xbox's in one house, thanks diogi) and more recently playing on xbox live over the internet. Last spring, my good buddy the proud papa (formerly known as honz and gandalf) and I decided to meet weekly to play halo and to use the time between games, while waiting in the lobby to share prayer requests and pray. This was done using the xbox headset so we are able to talk like we were on the phone. We started inviting other friends and ended up with a regular group of 5 guys on monday nights (emsdaddy, the proud papa, ryderlane, furious george, and trinipular). We would meet at 10, share prayer requests, read through a devotional and then pray. We would then head up to live and play Halo3 either by ourselves or online with others. The beauty of this is that we live no where near each other, but can fellowship together online. I was able to take my box with me on business trips and participated from my hotel room.

The highlight of all of this was when people we didn't know would jump into our lobby and hear us talking about God. This was a little hairy at first, expecting people to give us flak, but we found that people would either just leave or they would stay and ask questions about God the Bible and our faith. It was amazing. God used this silly game to plant seeds with folks from all around the world.

All of this fell aside when Triann got sick, but I am excited to say we finally started again this week.

There is a huge debate hiding in this post. Should a Christian be playing violent games online? I can't answer that for anyone, and don't know if I have a complete answer for myself. What I do know is that God found a way to use a group of us to reach some folks right where they are. We don't preach and we don't pretend to be perfect or know everything, but we explain what we believe and explain why WE believe it. Pretty cool in my book

If you are ever on xbox live, look me up and send me a message.

Eric "EmsDaddy" Benson