Training and Healing

Life is an adventure. In adventures, you explore the world and face challenges, you gain experience and grow stronger and more capable, and you occasionally face challenges that defeat you. So, you go and recover from your wounds, then you do some training to make yourself stronger, so the next time you face the same challenge or a similar one, you'll be better prepared for it.

I've spoken before about how we gain experience in life. Today, I want to talk about training and healing in adventure games, and relate that to real life. In many games, characters gain experience (or XP), by fighting monsters and wild animals. The stronger the monster, the more XP it yields, but it also brings a greater chance of more serious injuries, or even death. Death is a major setback in most games, and sometimes it's even a game-ender. You don't want to die. But the stronger a character is, the more XP they need in order to grow stronger, so, as they grow stronger, they need to face stronger monsters in order to keep growing. As they face stronger monsters, it's inevitable that they'll sometimes get injured, and perhaps even killed. It's a dangerous balance between facing challenges that are strong enough to help you grow, but not so strong that they defeat you. Fortunately, in real life, we don't have to worry about that part.

In real life, God often chooses our challenges for us. He gives us trials and temptations that He knows we can defeat (though sometimes, we need His help to defeat them), but that are tough enough to make a good challenge for us. As we successfully face our challenges, we become stronger, and God trusts us with tougher challenges to face. But sometimes we fall short. Maybe we were caught off guard. Maybe we forgot to get help from God, or weren't maintaining the prerequisites to receive His help. Maybe we weren't bold enough or brave enough, and ran from the fight because it looked too strong for us to face. Or perhaps we foolishly took on a challenge that we shouldn't have tried, and God let's us lose just to teach us a lesson.

Whatever the cause, as we face our various challenges, we occasionally take damage and need healing. Normally, we think of that as a bad thing. We don't like losing "hit points" in "monster encounters" any more than we like getting aching, burning muscles when we exercise. Some people would take that as an excuse to not face such challenges, but there's a saying that I don't always agree with, but that I feel applies here: "No pain, no gain."

In order to gain experience and grow stronger, we need to face our challenges boldly, and that will, occasionally, result in some minor to major injuries. Those injuries will require healing if they are to not become fatal, and almost all adventure games make a way for healing to occur. So it is with real life. God has made both spiritual healing and spiritual growth possible, and if we follow His plan for us, we will frequently achieve both. We will constantly grow stronger and stronger as we face tougher and tougher challenges, receiving frequent healing along the way.

The path God has planned for us is both difficult and painful, but it's the only way to achieve the desired results. Though it may seem hard at times, we need to remind ourselves that God knows what He's doing. If He brings us to a challenge, He knows we can overcome it. And as we overcome each challenge that He sends our way, we gain the strength we need to face our next challenges. Life is hard, but I'm grateful that I know there's a reason that it's hard, and, in the context of adventure games, the frequent, difficult challenges of life start to make a lot more sense.