It was Monday night and the queue started at 930pm. People were already gathering, excited, anticipating, literally sweating to get what they came for. And what they came for was a video game. Tuesday 8th November saw the release of one of the most anticipated video games of our life time, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. The shop I work at was opening from 1030pm and selling the game from midnight so the public could get their hands on it as soon as humanly possible. The next four hours were a blur as customer after customer purchased their copy, and I trundled out thoroughly exhausted at about 2am.
It got me thinking. There are so many reflections I could make on the night. Comparing my own desire for the eternal with the crowd’s desire for the temporary and finding myself lacking, wishing the church was as desperate to spread the gospel as these customers were to get their hands on the game. The memory of the night encapsulates all that I think is wrong with today’s consumeristic society. The must-have attitude where people are so desperate for the latest game, fashion, phone that they have to be one of the first to own it. The sad fact that this will all be repeated on perhaps an even bigger scale next year when the next Call of Duty comes out.
Even reflecting on the name – do we, as Christians, treat our call as a duty rather than a pleasure? Is that why we so consistently get it wrong. I don’t know. However I do know that as I left the shop that morning, my own discounted copy clutched tightly in my hands, I lamented that something has to change.
Romans 12:1-2 (The Message) ‘So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.’
