Of Crafting Mines

So I finally let my friend talk me into playing Minecraft. I started on the free demo, which I already knew I would love because I played the Minecraft Pocket Edition demo for hours before. And it wasn't even by the time the demo ran out, that I found myself wanting to buy it and only having to wait a day or two till I got paid. I then became a proud owner of Minecraft.

Minecraft is a great game. For those few of you who read this and don't know what it is, it is a game that revolves around digging and building anything you can dream up. Sure there is a story and a boss and endgame stuff, but the bread and butter of it is the building. I play the building on creative mode because when I get the itch to build I really didn't want to have to spend the time making and finding the materials.

Inside the Mansion

So I started with a rather militaristic looking warehouse like place. but that was just a place I could put my bed. After building a base, I ventured underground. Right away I was lost and spent hours making and cleaning up halls and trying to memorize my path. This was before I learned the "torches on the right side" tip. Eventually I found my first giant rift deep underground. And this would become the center of my underground world.

Right away I was building bridges to get across the whole thing, finding exits and stuff that would get me out of there, building glass bridges over lava just because it looked cool. Eventually I started adding 'shops' to the sides and making it into an uninhabited underground city, worthy of any dwarf.

I actually started feeling like I was a dwarf. Sure there are no dwarves in the game, but how I am and how I see myself and how I played the game, I was a dwarf. I dug out a bank so large I actually got lost in it. The cavern that was once there, replaced by stairs and chests. The disorder of the blocks, replaced with clean stone and smooth walls. Deep underground I was a stone master and this was my Mona Lisa.

Then I moved above ground and started building more houses. One I call the turtle, which is a big round structure with really cool lighting at night thanks to all the windows in the roof. Made one inspired by the house I designed in school, one with a giant Tri-Force on the front, which was modeled like the mansions in games like Resident Evil and Eternal Darkness, with a large central stair case leading to two wings of the house. This house, what I call the Mansion, floats high into the clouds.

The world I have seen

Then I got into the railway stuff, and making mine carts and tracks running to all of them. Then I wanted to get creative there, I made a track that goes through a water tunnel above the ground, then dives down and cuts through a mountain past a waterfall, and then into the river, all before it ends up winding around trees and ends at a giant cave opening in a mountain. And I found a whole new love in just making railway tracks that do something different.

I felt so good creating stuff, I started to move cows and pigs so my farm had something happening in it, instead of just looking cool. I started to make things look alive by adding furnishings. I made a cottage in the mountains, a home with modern architecture. I built a tower on top of a peak just because I could. But the game is missing one thing.

Having someone occupy the houses I made, run the stores waiting to be filled with product, work the land around the farm, some one to ride the mine carts around just because it was fun. I did this stuff, but there was nobody to share it with. No one to fill it with. But with all the creating that Minecraft has, you cannot create a person. Sure you can add villagers so you can trade and sell stuff with, who can now also harvest and plant new crops, and you could make the game on a realm so you can add your friends to your dream, but I can't fill the world with life.

Sometimes I imagine that was what God was feeling like when he was creating the universe. Maybe he made certain things to shine a bit brighter because he liked the color when they did. Or wanted to see what it looked like if a solar system spun the opposite way ours does. Did he put the animals in the farm just because he wanted it filled with something so it was doing something more than just sitting there? What if all of this is just a big Minecraft game for God? One where he too wanted to add people who would live and breathe and work the stuff he created.

I remember back in the day, there was a whole sub-genre of games called god games, where you played as a powerful being controlling a world of smaller people, trying to take care of them so that they would grow and become better. One big one that I played was Black and White. But never did it have the creation feeling that Minecraft does. In Minecraft I can build whatever I want mostly how I want.

Hubble Deep Field shot. Those are not stars they are galaxies

But if I was able to create people to fill my world, give them the ability to work, grow, create and live a life, and did it all because I was happy to see them doing what they do, and they began to ignore me, and say I didn't exist and the few people who still believed in me were called morons, simple-minded folk, wouldn't I be saddened by my creation? Wouldn't I try to bring them all to me, but because I loved how they did their things by their own free will, never force them to me?

This is a universe full of created things that are loved so much by their creator. God loved us so much that he even sent his son to us, to tell us about him and how much he loves us. He is trying to remind you every time you look at the stars and wonder what's out there, that he loves you. When you see the bright spring colors, smell the fresh rose, look at the rolling hills, he is writing you a love letter of the sweetest most beautiful words that exist.

We take what we see for granted because we see it everyday. We stop thinking of the beauty and start thinking of how we can use it to better fit ourselves. A jamais vu on the scale of the universe. Yet God is repeatedly hiding things for us to find that makes us happy, which makes him happy. God really does want the very best for all of us and he is more than willing to give it to us if we simply stopped, looked and listened to the world around us. The world is breaking apart the farther we get from God's love. The pieces are so fragile that only the original creator can manage to put them back together.

M74 galaxy from Hubblesite.org

This world needs the hope and love that can only come from God. In my opinion, we are far from his most impressive work. Quantum and Particle Physics, all 118 known elements out there, the way gravity works, how light travels its speed regardless of how fast you are traveling, or all the millions of galaxies out there and the billions of stars in our own galaxy, or the way a flower pops open in the morning sun welcoming the warmth and light of our little yellow sun are all way more impressive than us. But in all the impressiveness that is out there, God loves us so very much. This is what I have learned from Minecraft.