Mike’s Week in Review

Well, as you have noticed it has been a little while since we have posted anything on the blog.  Moving and then the family getting sick can really toss a wrench in things.  So . . what has been going on over at Pastor Playz this week?

Computer Issues

This has been the week of computer nightmares.  First I decided to erase my Vista partition to go 100% Win 7.  I decided to dump Vista all together because, well, frankly, it stinks.  Next morning I changed my mind after doing some tweaking in graphics settings and trying to get the best look/performance out of LotRO.  So I went back to Vista to see if DX10 would work smoother.  That and I was getting a terrible Windows Experience Rating in 7, which is due to a bug I have since discovered.

Well, long story short, in the process of moving things around, and trying to set up my firewire camera, I sort of blew up my firewire external hard drive. 

So here is a tip: Do not unplug your external hard drive while its powered on and connected.  *head desk*  All that data now lost.  Oh well.

Church Stuff

What an exciting week in regards to church and ministry.  Tuesday morning I had breakfast with Tom Stringfellow, our associations new director of missions.  To make this a short story as well, cause I could go on forever on this topic, Tom wanted to know what I would need and thought about starting a new work.  A new church plant that would not only reach a local group of people, but use the Internet and social networking/media for touching peoples lives.  Needless to say after the past 9 months this was a very uplifting conversation.  I have sent him the proposal and will write more later.  But we are VERY excited about what God is doing.

Family

Seems like this was the week to get sick.  Tanya has been feeling under the weather, but its so hard to know how bad she gets.  We call her Shira because of her extremely high pain tolerance.  I'm such a wimp compared to her.  Rachel then got sick as well as Bethany, and as I write this I am going down hill rather fast myself.

We have been unpacking boxes trying to fill our new residence.  It is such a blessing to be out on our own again.  God is really good, and we have some awesome friends.  Even with temporary situations, we have had the best 2 weeks of our last year.

Game

Many already know that we have taken an extended leave of absence from World of Warcraft.  Our financial situation is the majority of reason for this break, but also a lack of enjoyment in game was part of it.  I had max leveled 4 of my toons and sort of just. . yea. . ran out of things to do, or motivation.  The hardest part about the break is leaving our wonderful guild mates and friends behind.  But we do have Twitter and social networking to keep in touch.

I started playing Lord of the Rings Online again.  I am a founder with a life time subscription, which makes the money part a lot easier on us.  That and I LOVE LotRO. It is a visually stunning game with great game play and Lore that you CAN NOT BEAT.  Its Tolkien for crying out loud.

I have also been testing/trying out some other MMO’s for kicks.  Ill be writing some reviews, but lets just say that so far, nothing touches LotRO and WoW, that I have played so far.

So. . the week has been full of lots of things.  I am behind on Dev4Gamers, but have been getting ready to start a video stream of it when I record.  So look for me at 8 am Monday morning PST.  :) 

Mike's Week in Review

Where to start.  First, we do appolagize for not having

Who are we seeking?

Mike and I had the neatest experience on Monday.  We attended a live worship service online.  It was through Lifechurch, a church that has this awesome ministry on the internet.  In addition to watching the streaming service with people from at least 26 different countries, we were in a live chat room.  For someone like me who is very visually stimulated, the chat room was almost too much.  Having two things happening simultaneously on my screen was a little overwhelming.  Since I find myself compelled to read every post entered into the chat, I was getting pretty distracted from the worship and sermon.  There was also an option to open a tab of sermon notes in which you can see the sermon notes and add your own comments.  You can then email these to yourself to review later.  Next time, I think I will try to just have that tab open rather than the live chat.  Anyway, it was the most unique "church" experience I have had in a long time.  The sermon was great, and the extent of the spread of His Word was breathtaking.  I would encourage you to check it out at lifechurch.tv sometime.

While I was having a lot of trouble following all of the sermon, being in the chat room was an eye-opening experience for me.  God used it to expose some of my own prejudice.  While we were in the chat room, two people entered who were what is often called griefing.  They kept making comments like "There is no God" just to get a reaction.  Most people were ignoring them, but the room administrators were gently counseling them.  My first gut reaction to these two individuals was to wonder why the admins did not just ban them from the room.  After all, they were disturbing my ability to listen to the message.  After a few minutes, one of them left on his own, but the other stayed in the room.  He was quiet for a little while.  Near the end of the sermon, he began to make comments again.  The admins once again responded kindly, trying to point out to him the existence of God.  He began to ask questions like, "Where was God in 9/11?,  Where was God during Katrina?, etc."  Then Mike chimed in, reminding us all that those things were a result of sin in the world, not a lack of God's presence.  While the "griefer" (for lack of a better word at this point) was still very caustic in his statements, he was beginning to be more open to the answers being given him by the others in the room.  It was becoming clear to me that in his own way, he was seeking God, just unaware how to find Him.

Now for the part about my own prejudice.  At first, this guy was really bugging me.  I was getting irritated by his comments and the admin's apparent lack of getting rid of him.  After all, he was disturbing my worship experience.  Then God gently reminded me that he came to seek and to save those who were lost.  As I thought about what had happened, I realized that, like many in our churches today, I am not always as accepting of the unsaved as I should be.  We want our churches to be filled with God-filled, righteous, Christians.  Yes, we need those in our churches.  But our job is not to sit around parsing the Scripture with others just like us.  We need this to keep growing in our own faith, but our job is to take the message of God's love to those who have never heard.  Jesus' ministry was not to the "church people".  His ministry was to the sick, the dying, the untouchables.  He spent his time with thieves, prostitutes, the unwanted and untouched.  When those around him had accepted his message, he did not tell them to stay with him to learn more.  He sent them out to the surrounding countryside to preach the gospel.  I was very convicted of my own want to just be around those like me.  I don't always want "those people" in my life.  They make me uncomfortable.  But isn't it our job to go to them to share the love of God with them?  If the admins had kicked the griefer out of the room, his perception that Christians are haughty and rude would have been solidified.  Instead, he felt the love of God through the actions of those he was criticizing.

Perhaps this is the problem in many of our churches today.  We have a prejudice towards those who don't know God.  We say that we want our churches to grow, but do we want to invite the untouchables in, those who so desperately need to hear about salvation?  Perhaps, we need to remember that the Great Physician came for the sick, not the healthy.  We need to remember where we once were, dying in our own sin.  I think this is harder for those like me who were raised in church.  Jesus came to seek out and to save those who are lost.  Maybe we (I) need to so some seeking out of the lost ourselves.

Test text

I Will Be Here

For a very, very special person, the love of my life.  Happy Birthday Tan.

Dev4Gamers is Back

Well, after being away for far to long, and with a break in a few other areas of my life, Dev4Gamers if off and running again.

For those who do not know what D4G is let me try to give a brief explanation.  Back in 2005 I was at a Pastor's Conference with Bob Veach (@bveach on Twitter).  While we where there I ran into a friend Daryl Watts, member of the Healthy Church Group of the California Southern Baptist Convention.  Daryl was going on about a new thing called a podcast he had heard done by the son of Dr. James Dobson.  In Daryl's own words, he did not understand everything behind the scenes but thought it was cool.  And then the inner geek in me took off.

It was cool, the ability to subscribe to a program and listen to it any time you wanted.  Fantastic!  Just prior to this meeting in the mountains I had begun a blog called Dev4Gamers, a daily devotion that I wrote aimed at those in the gaming community.  Something relevant and real.  After that weekend however, and my love of audio and anything computers, it became an audio podcast.  And so was born the Dev4Gamers podcast.  A short devotion that you could download and play any time you wished.

It was truly amazing to see how God used such a simple thing to touch many lives and make new friends.  And over time those I had met and been able to touch began to reach out and do their own things and even have a larger impact, which is WONDERFUL!

The absence of the podcast had many factors, many of which involved some real life tragedy and sorry that God has brought us through, and admittedly some laziness or self pitty.  But now, more than ever, if this only benefits me and my walk, is it time to start up again.

I encourage you to send feedback if you like or dislike it, agree or disagree.  You can always get a hold of me by emailing manorton@gmail.com Gtalking to the same address, Skype at mano-igo or follow my twitter at http://twitter.com/manorton

So here is today's Dev4Gamers

D4G - Spiritual Noob

I will be adding the back catalog of podcasts to the site so you may hear past ones. It will take time so please be patient.

So What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?

Yesterday we said farewell to some of our best friends in real life.  Bob and Michelle Veach, and boys, are leaving Cooper Ave Baptist Church after 9 and a half years of serving as Associate Pastor of Students, or whatever Bob's title ended up during the time there.  It was a wonderful time filled with stories that made us laugh and cry.  I was standing near our families usual seat in the sanctuary when Dr. Tom Stringfellow, our associations Director of Missions came up to me and asked  a simple question.

"So what do you want to be when you grow up Mike?"

At face value one could get a little insulted at such a question.  Especially when you are forty years old.  I mean, shouldn't you know what you want to do and be doing it?  But Tom was not asking in order to insult, he was asking to find out what he could do, as an equip-er, to help.  He knows, exspeicaly with the emotional air around Bob leaving and heading out into the unknown, that the wounds from my leaving First Baptist where fresh.  And honestly for the past few months I have been floundering back and forth wrestling with God on what it is he desires of me and my family.

I have come to the point that I know that the only thing I can do, the only thing that I am truly good, or gifted at, is serving God.  So I told Tom just that.  I want to do what he can use me in.  Now . . most would say, what a cop out.  Not sure eh?  Some might expect someone to say, "I want to be the senior pastor of (fill in the name of a huge successful church here)."  But honestly I have always wanted what he wants.  I have no aspiration to be top dog, I just want to serve.  Mind you I am aware of the gifts he has given me, in leadership, teaching, connecting with people.  But Tom pushed the subject, and it led to a little bit of discussion between us, as much as standing in the middle of a rapidly filling auditorium could allow.

To be honest with myself and with you, part of my hard time answering the question is that God has shown me some wonderful things in how to truly connect with people.  The frustrating part is that when I begin to talk to someone around me in the real world about how cool it was to hang out with 9 other people online, working together to take down a enemy together in order to pass out some loot that it drops that most likely goes to someone in our group that needs it. . well.. imagine a deer in the headlights look.  Facebook, Twitter, Email, Computer games, Coffee at Starbucks, texting back and forth on your cell phone, just a few examples of how people are connecting, and where people are today.  So part of the reluctance might be not wanting to be looked at like some loon.

Not limiting the possibilities is another reason to possibly not directly answer such a question.  If I say, yes, I want to be a Worship Pastor, then what if he wants to show me a senior pastor position, or even a custodial job that allows me to shine in his kingdom?  I have always been a sort of jack of all trades master of few, or even none.  I love to learn, I love to teach others about what I learn, I love technology, innovation, relevance.  I don't want to pin him down and lose out on something.

So my answer was, "Whatever he wants of me."

Then as the service went on, Tom brought the message, my mind was going over what I was going to say about Bob since I had been asked to join the group of people getting up to speak about him and say something nice.  My mind raced as I saught our families life verse when it hit me.

Jeremiah 29:11
"For I know the plans I have for you" —[this is] the LORD's declaration—"plans for [your] welfare, not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. " (HCSB)

God has gifted me with some unique talents.  He has given me a desire and hunger to reach people that, for the most part are not sought.  He has shown me that it is possible.  I turned to Tanya and said, "Hun, I think I just need to put down that He has called me to be a tech pastor."  Instead of the look of frustration with me for having my head in the clouds she said, "then that's what you put on your resume."

So, what do I want to be when I grow up?  I still want to be someone that God can use for what he wants.  What that entails is working with technology, computers, media, sound, video, facebook, twitter, computer games, phones, computer software, whatever it takes to reach people and be a friend.

For those who have a mindset that the church is to look like, or feel like it was in the 50's, well, thank you for all you have taught me, thank you for all you have done for us, and thank you for how radical you where then.  But please, remember that society is changing and the best way to reach people is to be where they are.

So, Brother Tom, what do I want to be when I grow up?  A Tech Pastor.

[VIDEO] Penn on the Gift of a Bible - How much do you have to hate someone?

This is not new.  As a matter of fact the first time I saw it was on a facebook friends link the other day.  

My respect for Penn has jumped with some very simple, and outside our world perspective on the subject of our faith.

If only we could be so bold.

What do you think?

Lost and Bored – Need New Goals

I have been feeling a since of being lost of late.  I just hit another goal of mine, to get Bricklethumb, my dwarf hunter, to level 80.  This makes my 4th 80 in WotLK, which according to some would label me hardcore.  I am not so sure I am hard core, but I do like to push myself in all areas of my life to see how well I can do.  It is part of the “gamer DNA” that is in me.

I have been splitting some of my time between WoW and Lord of the Rings Online right now.  While I seek a new place to serve, resumes out, making follow ups, and finding it hard to find employment as a 40 year old geek who has been in ministry for over 20 years, I have had to much time on my hands.  So Instead of the joy and fun I have always had in my chosen form of entertainment, much more stimulating that TV, IMHO, I now face a wall I, and others, have or are facing.

What to do now?

As  I logged on WoW last night discussion started in guild chat on what to do.  This is where some frustration sets in.  We often spend way to much time just trying to decide what to do.  Added to this issue is that two of us have multiple toons to help the guild out.  I have a tank, healer, and two DPS.  Iss, a good friend, has a healer, tank and DPS.  We both do not mind playing whichever character is needed, but sometimes to put our personal goals on hold to help out. . But that is what we like to do.  On top of this, we have 1 to 2 to many for a five man group. So someone has to sit out.  Normally you would think that people would whine and complain about this, but our guild is different.  We fight over who will sit out to make sure someone else has a go at it.  *smile*  I love that in them, even though it prolongs getting things done.

So I finally bit the bullet and made a list of people who where going to go do an instance that 2 people needed for quests.  I jumped on Vent where Iss and I got a chance to talk before and after the instance.  He made a very good observation after asking me a pointed question.

“So, your getting bored with the game too?”

The answer is yes and no, and the funny thing is we have both gone through this before.  When I started playing WoW I got to a point where things became boring.  I was not in a guild that raided and I had pretty much done all I could do alone or even in the small guild we had.  So when I heard about Lord of the Rings Online I jumped at it.  We left wow, headed to LotRO and formed Redeemed, our kinship on the Gladden server.

While there we met a player who joined our Kinship named Issichar, or Iss.  Iss was from WoW and bored and came to LotRO.  Iss was the kind of guy that was helpful and giving, a perfect fit for our group.  Several others either came with us from WoW or met and joined us while there.  But after a few months we started to hit the “So, your getting bored with the game too?” wall.  Most of us headed back to wow.  New content helped, and then the promise of WotLK. 

But, I ramble.  So lets bring things back to point.  I am not the only one feeling a since of loss, or boredom.  We are waiting for our guild to catch up, and desperately need some new people if we are ever going to hit up 10 man, let alone ever want to see 25 man content.  In the mean time what do we do?

The observation that hit me between the eyes was when Iss said that with ADD/ADHD he needs goals, once those goals are hit its sort of . . hit and miss. . .roam around. . get bored.  BINGO!  He hit it on the head.  My first character to 80 was Paravel, my healer.  Soloed her the 10 levels as resto, was fun.  Valimonde, my tank, leveled with Tanya’s mage, so we would get levels when we could.  I rolled Digory, my Death Knight and while not working on Val, got him to 80.  Then Val and Tatiaana (Tanya’s mage) hit 80.  Some gearing up . . all goals. . .pvp for Dig.  Then bored. 

Ok, no problem, let me level Brick.  Pushed him from 73 to 80 in 2 days.  Hit goal. . and . . . and . . . .

/run LotRO  - work on new character  - not many people around
/run WotLK – sit at character sheet and stair at what character to play.  Log one in. . .do daily. . get bored . .

/sigh

So . . . what is one to do?  How does and can this affect other areas of our life?  If we lose our goals, or hit them, what next? 

Let me know what you think?  Are you bored?  How do you overcome it?  Game, Life, Church, Family, whatever.

Twitter? Huh? New Way to Swing!

We truly live in a very connected and wired age.  With this age of communication ease has crept up some interesting and fantastic tools that help plug people into one another’s busy lives.  Gone are the days of “small town” Mayberry, where on any given evening you could walk around and talk with your neighbors as they swung on a large comfy swing on the front porch.  Today our lives are so busy that once we get home from work we rush to the fridge, get dinner started, make sure the kids are getting homework done and getting ready to rest and relax for the night, that is if you do not have extracurricular activities, preparation for the next day at work or what not. 

Our world has changed.  People are not as open to company just dropping by as they once did (This affects church and ministry life drastically, but ill save that for another post.)  At the beginning of this age you could feel a vacuum as people started to pull away from others, but then something deep inside of us longs to be connected.  But we don't have time. . We are busy.  I should take an hour or two out of my night to go over and see so and so, but then it turns into a 4 hour ordeal, then we get to bed late, and wake the next morning more tired that before.  Ever happen to you?  So what do we do to connect?

I am so glad you asked.  *smile*  About a year and a half ago I learned of something called Twitter.  At first it seemed silly.  It was explained to me that you simply put in up to 140 characters of what your doing, and people who follow you can read it. 

At first I was like.. “uhm. . so?”  I mean who wants to know when someone had a really yummy peanut butter sandwich?  So I put it aside for a few months until some issues in my ministry and life fell apart to such a stage that I withdrew into a deep cave.  It was at this time, the time I needed people and connections, that I blew the dust off of this platform and started to learn of its power to connect people together on so many layers and levels.  It was not simply about eating lunch.

Twitter has grown into an organic thing with people posting whatever they want, within the 140 character limit.  As of this writing I follow 138 people, and have 110 people following me.  This is amazing.  As someone who wants to know what others think and feel I can . . eavesdrop on a public conversation they chose to share.  I have been able to learn some amazing things about some of the people I have known for years or even days.  Things they reveal are non threatening, yet give us a picture of who they are. 

Not only can I see what they post, but I can in turn respond to them in a quasi IM.  By responding to them with an @ symbol I can direct a message to them that others that follow me and them can see.  Connection!

Now when I post something I have 110 people that will read it when it comes across their feed.  They too can then respond to me.  I will typically share small tidbits about my gaming, struggles, blog posts, ideas, questions and more.

Twitter has opened our world that is busy, bored, and alone into something that even in our hectic schedules gives us the ability to connect on a level not done before.  The ways to use it are endless.  And to be honest, the best way to get your head wrapped around it is to just do it. 

Head over to http://twitter.com and set up an account.  Then follow some users.  You can follow me by going to http://twitter.com/manorton Once you are following people just sit back and watch, learn and interact.

Come join me and others on the new swing on the new front porch, doing the same thing we did 50 years ago;  Sharing small bits of our lives with others.