GrandCon 2017

Greetings Warriors and Scholars!

This last weekend at GrandCon was amazing. Lot's of people came by the Nerd Chapel table and we had the highest attended Nerd Chapel service at a con ever! I got to talk with some great vendors, run two games of Pandemic and teach a few people to play Monsterpocalypse. This year the con was held in downtown Grand Rapids at the Devos Place.

At the table I handed out a lot of stickers from GameChurch and some coloring pages from Costumers for Christ plus a few bookmarks for "God Loves the Freaks" by Stephen Weese. I also sold a few copies of 42:Discovering Faith through Fandom and met some great people. I was surprised when Albin Johnson, founder of the 501st, a cosplay group that is well known for quality Star Wars cosplays, stopped by the table and talked with me for about 10 minutes. He was very encouraging.

In the service Tom Vasel of the Dice Tower preached about the storms of life, I led communion and Jon Mietling (designer of the game, "Zephyr Winds of Change") led us in worship with his guitar. This was the first time we have had someone come bring a guitar for help with worship. About 32 people came which is double our highest attendance in the past. It was a bit hard to find the room as it was on the 3rd floor and there was no signs from the con for the seminar room (the room itself did have some permanent signs).

A lot more cosplay this year than last year.

Darrin Ball ran a lot of games including Trench, Formula D and a Dominion tournament.

Monsterpocalypse!

Jesus and the Happily Ever Sacrifice

Greetings Warriors and Scholars!

Found on IMDB.

I watched a bit of an episode of "The Librarians" from TNT the other day. Season 2, Episode 9: "And the Happily Ever Afters." The team was under a spell in a small town on an island all experiencing their idealized dream of a life. Flynn Carsen (played by Noah Wyle) had been off finding more artifacts and came home unaffected by the spell to find them all gone and the clippings book going crazy with a situation on the island.

He found them quickly but they were all held in this. He also found a fairy (played by Hayley McLaughlin) who helped him trap them and talk to them. What they found was that they needed to choose to give up the idealized life in order to be free of the spell and claim their true life back.

Do you have your idealized life? Do you have your happily ever after? Sometimes what we think is our best life is just a ruse. It might be really good things, but it is not what God dreams for us. Jesus himself said that we need to lay down our lives to find it.

"Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it." Matthew 10:39

There are the dreams we dream for ourselves, and there is God's dreams for us. His vision for who we can be and the adventures we can experience. Sometimes he gives us something else we had not thought of and sometimes He gives a thing we give up back to us, perhaps transformed in a way we had never thought of.

In the show they had to place talismans down to symbolically give up the fake lives, but Paul tells us that presenting ourselves to God "as a living sacrifice" is our "spiritual act of worship" and is pleasing to God (Romans 12:1).

We live in a world that says we should live according to our desires. That we must be subject to our nature, but Jesus tells us to give that to Him and to control our natures. One day we will even give the crowns we have earned by serving God back to Him, as a way of recognizing that it was all about Him anyway.