What Do You React To?

      The transition to college wasn't the easiest for me. I did well in high school, but my work habits were sloppy and most of my life structure was imposed upon me by my parents. When I found myself in a situation where a little last minute cramming and flurry of effort couldn't bring me the results it once had, I got into a downward spiral. Crappy work lead to crappy performance which lead to me feeling crappy about myself just as a person (I'll discuss this flaw in my concept of self-worth in a later post, for now let's move on). Last semester was a train wreck and I carried all the baggage from it into this semester. By the end of January I was hitting breaking point. As I sat on the floor of my bedroom praying to God for some kind of guidance out of the hole I'd dug myself into, I got an answer: "Everything in your life is subconsciously reacting to your opinion of yourself and your problems. That makes them your god and that's garbage. *I* am your God. And these issues are nothing compared to Me."

Video Games and the Male Mind

      For those of you who have been in a coma since around when the first Star Wars movie came out in theaters and just woke up, we now have these things called 'video games' that can be played on our tube-less TV and graphics-capable computers. While you marvel at that (and our lack of neon-colored suits) I should also tell you that these video game things have also been a teensy bit controversial. One of the theories that swirled around the motive for the Columbine shooting was that the boys responsible had played too many violent first-person-shooter games. And now there is rising alarm in some circles that the age of the average gamer is now 35. The popular image of the boy who had 'failed to launch' used to be the bachelor who played the field with girls instead of committing and settling down; now it's a fat, unwashed slob who plays World of Warcraft or Call of Duty until 4AM. So what's the deal here? Why is this one form of entertainment so enticing and divisive?

Redemption: Cheating at an Unwinnable Game

      I recently watched Night and Fog, a French film about the Holocaust, for my World Religions class. I'll spare you the worst details, but the part that really got to me was when the film showed images of the absolutely evil and depraved experiments that Nazi 'doctors' conducted on prisoners in the name of their twisted racial science. And yet, my religion demands that I accept that the people who did those barbaric, downright satanic things have the exact same opportunity to be saved that I have been offered.