TheWRITEaddiction.com

The world is a crazy place. This election cycle has become a mockery of democracy.  (Sweet November, please hurry.) People are recording violence on their cell phones and then assaulting the rest of us by posting it in their social media time lines.  As if that wasn’t bad enough, now people are live streaming what the coroner has called homicide.  We are all hurting, angry, sad, and exhausted.

At least we were.  But that was last week.  Almost overnight, the stories on my news feed went from depressing to diversion.  You see, now, the world has discovered Pokemon Go.  The game is centered around a concept called Augmented Reality, which encompasses the world around you, but allows you to see things through the lens of your camera phone that do not exist in the virtual world.  I’m technologically challenged, so I don’t really get it.  But I don’t have to understand it to enjoy it.

Let me be clear.  I have not played the game.  My children downloaded it on their aunt’s phone over the weekend.  They were so excited to tell me about all the little creatures they had captured.  I can only name one Pokemon character, and i’m not sure i could identify that one in a line-up. But I enjoyed the fact that they wanted to share their augmented reality with me.

I realize that as a Christian, I too, live in an augmented reality.  It is why i can call those things that are not, as though they are.  It is walking by faith, and not by sight.  It is why i can still have hope, in what the naked eye would call a hopeless situation.

My job as a person of faith, is to see this world, not as it is, but as it could be, and to do whatever I can to make that reality.  The Christian worldview is that of Rose (of Sharon)-colored spectacles.  It requires me to see the God in those who believe there is no God.  It requires me to love without fail and to pray without ceasing.

The augmented reality of Pokemon Go can quite literally be just a walk in the park.  But the augmented reality of my life as a Christian is much more of a challenge.  Yes we will both do battle.  Yes, I am trying to capture and train others.  But the Pokemon players, have the luxury of turning off the phone.  I do not.  My GPS (God Positioning system) doesn’t have an off switch.  Sometimes it leads me to the ugliest of places, and yet through His eyes i have to find the beauty.

Sometimes that’s really hard to do.  But I press toward the goal, knowing that one day my reality won’t have to be augmented at all.  You all will see it too.

Mama Radford