Some shots form Seattle

Idols: beyond the images

This is also another set of notes from resisting idolatry like Jesus.

Idols:
What is an idol? I used to think that an idol was anything that we worshiped that is not the God all mighty, And it is true, but beyond this simplistic definition, I thought it was any image, saint or supernatural power out side of God that I place my faith in.

An idol could be something good, something that in it's essence is not bad such a person, a hobby, work, a pattern of behavior such as eating or drinking, knowledge, and almost anything that God has created for us to enjoy.

I have been exploring this issue of idols in my own life and I have come to realize that I have a person, behaviors and in particular my hopes and desires for the future. Let me brake it down: first a hope for the future. Since I can remember I have always wanted to meet the perfect gal that will love me and I will love and will be the mother of my kids. In my search for this perfect person I have fallen into patterns of behavior that are not healthy for me such as dating a bunch of girls and giving them hope or them giving me hope for something that was not leading anywhere and ended up breaking our hearts. And finally a person, one of these girls turn into my idol, blurring my walk with God, not her but the fact that she had taken the place of God in my life.


My own personal hell
In order to understand the root of our idolatry we need to understand what creates the need for us to worship that idol. I understood many years ago that the purpose of my life is to worship God, that I was created to have communion and a relationship with him, but sin is in our way, and all the lost souls and many Christians (including myself) try to find that purpose by worshiping creation and not the Creator, trying to find the joy that ultimately comes from God in all created things.

For me, hell is loneliness, to picture myself in the future with no spouse and family breaks my heart. To be lonely is my own personal hell, it is not the real hell, but it is definitely the one place I would like to be delivered from and in order to be delivered from it I need a savior. But guess what, Jesus is not the savior that I found, instead I found a created savior that I thought would deliver me from that little hell and this is ended up very badly for me.


Our personal saviors
So who is this personal savior? For me it was a girl, a functional savior. Since I can remember I have been making mental and written list of the person that I want God to give me as a spouse. I found a girl that was not exactly what I looked for but she had a side of her personality that I thought was good enough for me and she lead me to think that I could spend the rest of my life her. Obviously she was in my mind my functional savior, the one that would deliver me of all my loneliness and to walk together with me for the rest of my days. She was a functional FALSE savior. The result is that we start to make sacrifices to these idols: we spend time, money and other important things at the expense of things that are truly important such as our physical of psychological health, other people and so on.

For you this functional savior could be a thing or a person. Think about the many times you have said to yourself
"if I only have this, or get to do that, I would be happy"
If I had a girl like her I would stop suffering, if I could only get that job I would be set!, if I could get to travel the world or have a house by the beach... it will deliver me form my hell and I would be happy for ever.

But the truth is that we loose our interest in it once we have it and we run after the next functional savior: we need something better. Now that I have found the savior of my hell, and I understand that I am still lonely, that it does not satisfy me, that it will not fulfill me I have to run after another and "better" functional savior.

Let me stop here for a second that reiterate what I said at the beginning, many idols are not bad, they turn bad in our life when they take the place of savior, of god in our heart and it can only be fulfill by Jesus.

Breaking down the idols
By getting rid of the idol, braking up with girl/boy friend will not change anything, selling car, or just trying to hide it from your life will not break the idol, another functional savior will come by and fill the place left by the old one. We have to find the root of the idolatry, that self created hell and understand it and let God take control of it.

For many of us will take a season of repentance and healing, self exploring and hundreds of hours in the presence of God. Jesus is the only one that can fill the void of the heart and he is the only that can restore us, when our worship is only for him, all of our relations, all of our behaviors and all the things we do and have are for the Glory of HIM, when Jesus is the center of our life everything else revolves around it and is sanctified and good; I will be able to have a girlfriend that I will respect, get to know and slowly give my Love and my heart as I try to win her heat, respect and love. I will make her my bride and our relationship will be blessed by God her parents and mine, And the result of all these, I am very sure, will be a big smile in God's beautiful face and a family created for his glory and not mine.


Reflection on salvation
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Listen to the folowing sermon for more information

Gospel partnership

These are my notes and a few personal thoughts on the rebel's guide to joy in loneliness, in particular gospel partnership:

The success of any relationship is a Jesus centered relation. But unfortunately most of us are looking for a relationship, friends, partner, family, etc. that will satisfy our selves or fill the void of loneliness that we constantly feel in our life, but how much satisfaction can we find in a relationship like this?

Not long ago I was talking to a friend that has tons of friends and knows a lot of people, he never seams to be alone, and he is always doing something with someone. But in an honest conversation that we had he told me that whenever he comes back home and he is alone the void and loneliness is very real it is always constant, some how it never goes away despite of multiple friends. I realize that we are meant to have something more that just community and relationships with others. More so, I am still trying to discover what this means and what it would be if I center all my relationships in Christ alone.

What it is not
First let me explain what a gospel center relationship does not mean. It does not mean that I am bashing my friends in the head telling them about the bible, it does not mean that I will be talking about Jesus and the gospel every time I open my mouth, or scream hallelujah, praise God, or Jee-zus every time something good happens, It does not mean I will stop hanging out with them if I see patterns of sin in their life, or if I loose my interest in them because all of the sudden I realize they where not the great person I was looking for in a relationship so I “dump” them, or because they hurt my feelings or said something I do not agree, or they just do not meet our standards, or we just do not want to give them the benefit of the doubt when a problem comes along. There is a hundred other things that I could mention here, but these are only a few that I know I have done in the past hurting others or other hurting me.

We should not be alone
We are not made to be alone: "Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; ^I will make him a helper fit for him.”" (Ge 2:18). We are made for relationship, first and for most with God, and second with people, and in the case of the man and the woman to be with each other. But I am not literate enough in this last point so I will not talk about it. I know most people crave relationships and companionship, they don't want to be alone, the problem is that most of us look for self centered relationship and not a gospel centered one. I will try to explore this as best as I can since I am just learning about it.

Mark Dirscoll explains loneliness as a separation from God and from each other because of sin; it creates spiritual death, physical death and relational death. There for when we experience this feeling of emptiness we have a continual struggle with loneliness. As a result of loneliness we look for friends, but most friendships are not deep and meaningful enough to be the answer to loneliness. Most friendships happen because there is proximity and affinity: friends have similar things in common that bring them together and/or happen to be physically near. Another way to fill our emptiness is to look for a spouse, or a romantic relationship. A gospel center relationship applies to any kind of relationship, because it is not centered on us or the need to fill a void.

The Cure for loneliness
Gospel partnership is the cure for loneliness, because Jesus died and rose from dead for our sins and to bridge our separation from God, we are reconciled with God and we can be reconciled with one another. There for when two sinners get together to start any kind of relationship, it is predestine to not be what we dream of. Two sinners will sin against each other, the sin will come in between the both of them and it (sin) will kill the relationship. But if Jesus is the center, and he takes away the sin and they both agree to have a Christian relationship, the result is a behavior toward one another that resembles the way God has treated us. If we sin, we repent. If they sin against us we show grace and mercy there for reconciliation takes place

Sin with repentance and grace = peace

In sin we are at war, but in repentance and grace we reconcile and we are at peace, and we experience this in our human relationship when we repent and grace is given there is peace. But when this does not happen, we ran away from relationships and it does not feel right. If you ever wonder why you feel like you do not want to see any more a person that you have had problems with, or why, when you see this person you feel a knot in your stomach? Why do you feel like you need to run away from the person that you sinned against or that has sinned against you? There is sin with no repentance and grace. At this point two questions arise: first, do you feel like you are not at peace with some one? And second do you need to repent or give grace? Take a moment and look at Joseph’s life when his brothers come to him for help in Egypt not knowing that he was their little brother, read Genesis 44 and 45.

This will only work if both of the parties agree to have this kind of relationship. I have always said this: “a relationship is a two way street”, but it will not be this way if we do not define the relationship in terms of the gospel, repentance and grace; to be honest when it comes to defining what kind of relationship I have with others is where I fail the most, not because I do not define it, but because I fall short to be like Jesus.

Many times gospel partnership do not need proximity or affinity, because the center is Jesus, we can be friends with the “undesirable ones”, we can keep a long distance relationship with family and friends because our motivation is different, and we can be more like Jesus who hang out more with sinners than with righteous men.

A good example of someone that had gospel partnerships was Paul, he was a man that experienced extreme loneliness, but in several occasions he said that he had joy in the midst of imprisonment and adversity, he had joy because he had gospel center relations and the progress of the gospel was the source of his joy. “Joy is not a feeling; it is a lifestyle that celebrates the forward progress of the gospel.”(Mark Driscoll)

Today is a good day to start
Start today repenting of your sin and giving grace to those who have done you wrong, restore your broken relationships and don’t just dispose them as a piece of trash that is not good for you any more. Center all you relations on Jesus.

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For more information listen to the following sermon.

oktoberfest with Tim, Beau and Adam

Tim and Beau, Just water for me plz


We had a good time, the place was packed with tons of "La Mesa" people :)

Lady playing that thing... she was really good, you can see it in the little girls face lol

Working Late, Studing hard

still at work and just implemented a mini map for the game, it is not so much a mini map as an actual map that tracks specific positions where the player will take measurements...

don't ask me why, it is just part of the requirements, but I am very happy because I spend 8 hours working on all thee images and locations to map the dots into the image...



well for more info on this just check my blog on the tgedev.blogspot.com
some lame images of what I have been doing :P


I have also been keeping myself busy studying, in particular for the Emergent and adaptative computation class. Basically study evolutionary, adaptative and genetic algorithms that will be applied on individuals or cells (in a computational system) to produce organized and coherent behavior. this is particularly good when we have problems where the domain of the answer is too big to be analyzed, or the answer is constantly changing due to changes in the environment that it resides. there for we use several small individuals that could come up with rules that will be tested over time and changed or evolved over time to get better rules that will eventually lead us to the answer... I do not recommend to read more about this unless you are totally into the evolutionary and adaptative computation thing, and since I know most of my readers will not care, they probably did not make it all the way here, I know that my advice is a given...

One of the most important things I have been learning in my life lately is the fact that I need to repent constantly of my sins, of many of my actions, and patters of behavior form the past. In order to do this I also need to identify what are the idols that I have in me. I used to think that idols where all the images that the Catholics worship, but I understood that some people in my life where some of my idols, all things that I rely on to make me happy, on circumstances that will give me pleasure or any thing that is self center.

I know this is bad, but believe me I did not know I had so many idols in my life, and I didn't know that I was mad at God for not giving me those idols when I wanted them, and the obvious reason to this is that all these idols where taking the place of glory that ONLY belongs to God. Many idols are not bad in itself, they are bad when they become gods in our liefs. I think I will elaborate a little more on this applied on my own life since I will be listening to the mars hill message about this topic once more.

To all of you who care I love you.

Juanma

PS I just read this post and it does not make sense tome, I am tired so please forgive me :)