Too Much Video Games
by Oliver Carlos
When I was a little boy, video games were a new invention and they were just beginning to get popular. I remember a classic gadget called Game and Watch. Only affluent kids had one, I just watched over their shoulders as they played. Then there’s the Atari video games. They were played on larger screens. I think the Atari was connected to a television. It also had a pair of hand-held game controllers so two players can play the Atari at the same time. These were fads when I was in elementary school.
I had a classmate who had such a machine in his home, and he would invite us to watch him play. His place was just walking distance from school, so the whole gang would be there on days when we had early dismissal, or when there’s a school-wide festival that took the place of formal classes. Cutting classes was not in our vocabulary back then.
In those years, my friends find video games quite addicting. But unlike them, I never got addicted because I was just an onlooker. Nonetheless, when we were together at my friend’s house, we never noticed that so much time had passed while playing video games. We had so much fun laughing, shouting, and competing in those video game sessions.
One day, as we were so rowdily playing video games at my friend’s place, the lights shut down. There’s no electricity! There was a sudden brown out. The game was abruptly stopped at everyone’s dismay. We waited for a few minutes, and when we felt that the power won’t come back very soon, everybody packed up and bid my friend goodbye.
Since I lived in the same subdivision, I decided to hang around a bit. Only I and my friend were left in the sala. When all my other classmates have gone, suddenly the lights went on again! The older sister of my friend peeped from the kitchen and said, “Nice, now they’re gone.” I just learned that she pulled down the lever of their house’s fuse box to simulate a brown out so that we would all go home. She must have found us too annoying as we played video games.
I find this experience quite funny and amusing. But on a serious tone, I find great wisdom in it. One reality in life is one day all activities on earth will be abruptly cut short. That’s when Jesus returns. It’s described in Matthew 24:39–42 (NLV):
“It will be like this when the Son of Man comes. Two men will be working in a field. One will be taken and the other will be left. Two women will be grinding grain. One will be taken and the other will be left. Because of this, watch! You do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”
Christians believe that someday Jesus will come back and get those who are his. Nobody knows the date, but we are sure that it will really happen. Jesus enumerated the signs of his coming in the previous verses in Matthew 24, it seems all of them are visible in our time. He mentioned about wars, rumors of wars, earthquakes, famines, false Christs, persecution of Christians, and the spreading of the Gospel in all the world. Jesus is coming very soon, we must be ready.
If you haven’t accepted Jesus yet in your heart, just pray a sincere prayer of repentance, believe that he enters your heart and washes away your sins, and then ask him to give you a new life wherein he is the center.
If you have done this before, rejoice! You are assured that you are saved, and Jesus will take you with him on the day he returns. While waiting for that day, it’s good to do what we are supposed to do. It’s good for the master to find his servant doing what he was commanded to do while he was away. Jesus told us to share to others the good news on how to be saved. He asked us to do discipleship, teaching others to follow his ways. Jesus would be very pleased to see us doing these things when the game clock reads zero.
