The vanity of godless pursuits

This week ended up being a case-in-point for why I can’t play video games. On Sunday, instead of going to church, I watched some “Let’s Play” videos on youtube. This got me back into Dwarf Fortress. I didn’t play enough to disrupt my sleep, and I even made decent progress on my schoolwork (though I’ll admit that I’m about a day behind my plan from a week ago). But I did no exercise at all, even though I probably could have any day except Wednesday. My blog posting also suffered. Furthermore, I developed a bad attitude about work, and especially about the upcoming training seminar practice. I would probably be a bit sour about it anyway because it’s stressful and it forces me to speed-eat my dinner that day, but it’s kind of been haunting me because I feel like I won’t have enough time. And why won’t I have enough time? Because I want to spend it on video games.

There are many neat aspects of Dwarf Fortress, like the story-telling potential, but for me it really turns into a min-maxing colony builder. There isn’t much of an overarching goal for the game the way I play it, so when I reflected a bit on my week tonight I decided that I could drop it and direct my energies elsewhere.

I can’t remember where it came from (most likely from schoolwork), but for the last couple of weeks I’ve had the idea running through my head from Proverbs: “Get wisdom at all costs”. I picked up the Tim Keller devotional again briefly, and still found it underwhelming, but I was struck by his reference to a wise man building his house on rock vs. a fool on sand. He said that the greatest foolishness is basing your life on anything other than God. I’ve been obstinately trying to do that for most of my life, and in this last year I have felt the hollowness of this pursuit. In these past couple days also I’ve been feeling an echo of it. Though I’m set on the path of getting a Master’s in education, I’m constantly questioning my future career. In these thoughts resounds the vanity of godless pursuits.

Also, I think in one of the prayers Tim Keller talked about how Jesus lived with wisdom. It reminded me of how much I love the Idiot and other books or stories where the main character is Christ-like. Given that, why don’t I study the life of Christ more? I’ve only read through the New Testament past Matthew once in my adult life. And maybe it's worth reading a three-minute devotional to get that occasional nugget of gold.

It’s been almost a month since I started my resolutions. Honestly, I haven’t done very well. I’ve given up fanfiction, but my exercise and video game results have been mixed, and my spiritual focus has been non-existent. I excused myself for the latter by telling myself that I need to get advice from someone first, but I haven’t made any effort to get the advice. Thus, I haven’t made any effort on that resolution. Well, tomorrow I’m going to get started on it even without that advice. Incidentally, I also decided tonight that I only need to make night-before to-do lists on weekends.