I guess I'll give blogging a shot

I always thought Blogging was a waste of time, I still do, and as a Youth Pastor, I need more things in my life to waste time on, so why not try blogging! I'd prefer to do video blogging though cause then I don't have to sit and type it all out, I can just rant and rave and have random ramblings but for now we'll just do the typing thing. The thing I'm trying to grapple with these days is this concept that I've titled Escapism. What does it mean, how does it affect us, and more importantly how is it affecting our views of God and our relationship with Him.


To me Escapism is how we as a culture are obsessed with leaving the world behind and immersing our self in an alternate version of life. Even look at the way we travel, we get away and go some place exotic, or romantic, or of child like fun, a place that is completely different then we are because we desire to get away from it all. Or we abuse drugs and alcohol in order to blunt the edge life has on us. We are all trying to escape. Personal struggles for me, such as TV, or video games, fantasy novels or movies, I can engage in these on a healthy level but when it becomes my source of "recharge" am I really just escaping everything else, immersing myself in something and hoping that life won't be so harsh when I come back? Are we creating our own little bubbles where we can jump into and leave behind everything that hurts. Now i know that there are times in our life that we need to escape to go to a quiet place and remove ourselves from situations and circumstances so we can have an unbiased attitude towards them. And one could even argue that escaping or removing yourself is a biblical thing to do, however it is biblical to escape to God and to rest in God, not to escape to drugs, not to escape to entertainment. If you ask me we are being fooled, tricked by the ultimate trickster himself to believe that in order to be energized, to be unbiased, to be renewed, to have a Sabbath rest, a truly good person would escape, to leave everything behind, to allow it to collect dust, and engage in something that only leaves us desiring to disengage even more because we are concerned about that pile of real life sitting at the door to our alternate reality.

Like I said I’m still trying to wrestle with this idea, trying to flesh it out and understand the whole idea of escaping. Then again maybe this blog is me just trying to escape my real work...


what do you think?