The Confusing Direction of Apple Arcade

What is Apple's aim with games on Arcade? With Apple being as secretive a company as they are, bite sized info in interviews is the best we can do to find answers on what Arcade is for, how it makes money and what the incentives are.

It’s easy to determine that Apple just wants as many subscriptions as possible. Apple wants everyone on their devices, for as long as possible, because that assures them of future sales of their devices. So broadly speaking, it's an easy question to answer. More specifically though, what kinds of games is Apple trying to court? Apple wants subscribers and it wants those subscribers to be moderately engaged. So then what games are going to help drive that objective? In short, all of them. Whether it makes sense or not.

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The service started with a broad selection of genres. In the first year and a half, they even got a few games that seemed to be more at home on consoles than phones. In the last year, we have seen a deluge of classic phone games returning like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope. We’ve gotten some proper AAA treatment as well (at least, when you compare them to other mobile games), games like The Pathless and Beyond a Steel Sky are truly incredible on a mobile device, and the fact that they save data is shared across Apple devices makes them among the most convenient games in the world. It really is a selling point that I can play almost any Apple Arcade game on the phone, and then load my save file on a tv later and continue where I left off seamlessly. In some ways, its actually better than the Switch, because as portable as Nintendo’s handheld is, I can’t keep it in my back pocket like I can with my phone. I ALWAYS have my phone with me. Always. So being able to make progress on a game there, and then really enjoy the game later on the big screen is a gigantic selling point, and I can’t believe Apple hasn’t been bragging about this.

But I must admit I’m confused by some of the offerings on Arcade. Not every game needs to be a statement of Apple’s objectives. Not every game needs to be a flagship. But what is the purpose of putting another version of Crossy Road on there? Or Altos Odyssey? These are fine mobile games, but the free versions are also fine. In some cases they don’t even add anything to the game. They just move it over to Arcade, put a + on it, and take away the ability to spend money. The unlockables are still there, but they are placed behind 60 hours of grinding just like the free version. Is this a feature now? Annoying me with an incredulous grind, but taking away the temptation to spend money? That’s good design now? In the case of Simon's Cat, an Arcade exclusive, the game is fundamentally designed around microtransactions. It smells eerily like Candy Crush, and the “boosters” that you can bring into each level are as present and useful as ever, but now there is no way to buy them, and they are notoriously difficult to obtain through grinding. It’s almost like the game was finished, and then a month before release Apple comes in, offers them a check, and they decide to just release the game as-is. “Oh yeah, don’t forget to remove the microtransactions, boys. Isn’t this great? It’s a fun mobile game with no microtransactions or ads! What value!” 

That's cute, except that since the game was designed around milking money out of people, the fun that you had to pay for before, now isn’t even readily available in the game. So guess what? The game isn’t fun now. This serves a fantastic point, that many of the most popular games on mobile aren’t just badly designed because of the gameplay systems designed to rake money out of people, they’re badly designed even if you take money out of the equation. It’s fine for this to happen on a few releases. Again, not every game needs to be a masterpiece, but Apple can’t keep buying free-to-play games and putting a sticker on them to satisfy their audience long term. Not only is it bad business for keeping players engaged, it also just looks tacky.

I’m not necessarily mad that this is happening, mostly I’m just confused. Apple doesn’t talk about Arcade at all. Their press conferences barely mention any of their services besides Apple TV+, and even that gets little more than a paragraph. If their PR is anything to go on, it seems like Arcade is just an expense that they can write off during tax season, and another means of keeping their customers glued to their Apple devices. Maybe that’s the point. What’s humiliating is that if that’s true, the entire gaming industry still needs to look at Arcade as a threat. if Apple wanted to, they could easily fund 4-5 AAA experiences from major 3rd party studios and it would barely show up on their quarterly report. If these casual, cheap handout gaming experiences aren’t doing it for Apple’s Arcade customers, that might be what we see next.

Apple has already won the hardware business. In most major first world countries, they make up half of the phone market. In tablets, they are utterly dominating. In wearables, they have almost no serious competition at all. They already lock their customers in through iMessage, Facetime and other exclusive apps (personally, I am obsessed with their Notes and Reminders) and Arcade is the next significant means of doing that. Apple is well aware of the loyalty that comes from major exclusive releases in the gaming space. Mario, Zelda, Halo, and Gran Turismo are all major franchises in gaming that fans buy consoles for exclusively. Apple doesn’t have a big, hype-inducing, fanbase on an Arcade franchise yet. That doesn’t mean it isn’t coming. Since every game released on Arcade is exclusive, whenever they find that big hit, whether intentionally or accidentally, the paperwork already allows them to control what platform it winds up on. Arcade being a smash success isn’t a question of if, but when.

Remakes

 I don’t need to tell you how many remakes have been coming out over the last few years. You already know. You won’t typically see them crack the top ten list, but if the games weren’t selling well, you wouldn’t be seeing them remade like they are. A recent one I noticed is Ty the Tasmanian tiger. That game didn’t sell well when it initially launched back in(2003?) Although I suppose it sold well enough to earn a single sequel, the game never found a legacy beyond that. It was a respectable, decent platformer at launch, but even back then it wasn’t considered groundbreaking, and certainly didn’t seem to have much of a fanbase. A few months after the game launched, I never heard about it again…

Yet here we are 20 years later and Ty makes a triumphant return. This article isn’t about him or his game. He’s just an example. What I find interesting is that although Microsoft and Nintendo seem keen to lean into it, Sony pumped the breaks on bringing their old titles forward into the new age. In 2015 they began releasing a steady stream of PS2 classics, upscaled to 1080p for the PS4. But after about a little over 50 titles across a couple of years, the stream dried up, and we are left with a long wish list of PS2 exclusive games that remain on that old system. Even some of the all time greats, like Metal Gear Solid 2, or Spider Man 2. Not only the greats, but many of the B games from that era were good enough to warrant a modern play through, like Maximo or Way of the Samurai. 

Even playing these games in an illegal way is difficult. PS2 era emulation is imperfect, and lets be honest, as easy as emulation is, it would be much more satisfying to play it on a a legitimate platform and spend real money on it. Some of my favorite games of all time are stuck on the PS2, and even though the companies that made them are still around, the effort to preserve them isn’t.

Its strange how this lack of preservation compares across hardware platforms. Sony seems to care very little (unless the game is going to get completely remade), Nintendo has a long history or SORT OF preserving their games, and Microsoft, strangely enough, seems more driven to keep these games alive. Although they announced in 2019 that they were done adding title to the library of backwards compatible games, they showed a strong effort compared to their competitors. All told, Microsoft brought forward 42 original Xbox games to work across all of their modern console platforms. 42 is a paltry number compared to the 996 titles released in total for the system, but it is still far more than Sony or Nintendo have brought forward from that generation. I have trouble holding Microsoft to the fire on this one, to be honest. There were very few excellent Xbox exclusives in that generation.

They performed far better with their Xbox 360 library. They brought forward a total of 577 games from that system to their modern platforms. Xbox 360 had over 2000 games total, but we as gamers can be honest, no console has more than 500 truly good games. What Microsoft did was select the top 25% of the titles from that generation and bring them forward. I think that’s a hugely respectable effort. As a casual student of history, I understand that most of what we do as people doesn’t get passed down through the ages. As cruel as it sounds, not every poem deserves to be preserved. Not every book, not every movie, not every play. People and time both passively work together to weed out the not-so-great works that we as a society make. The greatest works among us are preserved. Thats ok. Some video game historians believe everything should be preserved. I understand the thoughts and intentions behind that, but it goes against human nature. If we are honest with ourselves, we don’t want EVERYTHING preserved, we just want the things we love.

A lot of people like to vent their frustrations with Nintendo about preservation, but they are actually doing the same thing with their libraries. The truly good games from the NES era are playable. There might be a total of 25 games from that entire era that actually hold up and are fun today. Even among that list, which should include The Legend of Zelda and the first Mario Bros, those games barely hold up today. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still fun, but they hardly compare to any respectable modern indie effort. The Super Nintendo library is the same. There were a lot of games that came out for that system, and many of them are being lost time. But the truly great among them, Nintendo has very lovingly preserved. A part of me balks at Nintendo hiding these behind their online subscription service, but I think that's actually the best path forward for something like this. Even as a huge Super Mario World fan, I don’t know how motivated I would be to actually pony up $5 to own that game on my Switch. I much prefer to subscribe to their service and get Super Mario World and the rest of that respectable Super Nintendo library available to me as an added bonus. It makes those games wonderful little experiences to play on the side, to revisit and appreciate, rather than invest actual money and sink in gobs of precious time.

I can’t end this article without mentioning the PC. Obviously, the best efforts are being done there. I can’t be bothered to list the number of emulators and classic stores that offer many of the games from every possible gaming era. It’s an embarrassment of riches if you know where to look. That presents its own problems, of course. Its like venturing into deep space. Windows is a wild west or compatibility, drivers, and ecosystems and perhaps always will be, but in an era where everything is becoming a closed garden, having a wild jungle nearby feels refreshing. 

The PS2 is one of my all-time favorite systems, and home to some of the best games I will ever play. Some of those games are being lost to time. But maybe thats just part of this whole process. Maybe some of this isn’t supposed to last forever. Maybe some it will get passed on to my kids through a simple story and description from my own mouth over a nostalgic dinner conversation, and then maybe they won’t remember cause my kids couldn’t care less about the games I used to love. But if I look at the big picture, thats what time is doing to all of us. Our own bodies and everything we make, only the truly great things remain. 

Thoughts on Matthew 6:21

 Matthew 6:21-“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,”
What we spend money on tells us what we value. We spend money on our hobbies. the things that decorate our home, on enjoyable weekends, on the bills we need to continue to live comfortable lives. 
Money is the oil that keeps life moving. It unlocks fun and opportunity, its the universal trading mechanism. Money is important. And money is something you will never have enough of. 

Whether you have an hourly or salary wage, the time you spend on work still matters. You have a finite number of hours that you can work in a day, and you trade that free time for money. Money that you spend to continue to live, and maybe to have a little fun while you're living.

In short, money is needed to live. A LOT of money is needed to live. Around 80% of household income is spent on bills and living expenses. Most Americans work 40 hour weeks. Which means if you are like most people on the planet, you're working 32 hours a week to pay your bills. The last 8 hours that you work is for you to spend money on you. Its for your hobbies, your downtime. Your interests. You. It can be spent on anything you want. And this might sound harsh, but you're going to spend it on the things that are most important to you.

When you spend money on something, not only are you assigning extrinsic value to it (what its worth, in dollars) you're creating intrinsic value as well. The item becomes the product of the hard labor you put in to afford that item. It becomes a product of your sweat, of your time, of your being. You create an emotional attachment for it. You become a fan of it.

Tribes that align themselves with particular products or brands exist everywhere. There is PlayStation vs. Xbox, Apple vs. Android, Ford vs Chevy, Coke vs. Pepsi, and so on. When you spend money on something, you create internal values for it. You create a love for it.

 
When you love something, you think about it. It consumes your thoughts. It drives you, compels you. 

Where your treasure is, that's where your heart is.

When you spend money on someone you love, you strengthen YOUR love for them. You reaffirm your commitment to them, you lift them above your hobbies, interests and your own personal desires. You elevate them even above yourself, because the money that you would have spent on yourself is now being spent on something entirely outside of yourself.  

When you spend money on someone you love, you take the love that you had for them and elevate its importance. It creates in you a desire for them.

Spending money on your spouse is important. Not just in the sense that it makes them feel special. Because if often can, but because it makes them special to you. When two people spend money on each other, they're investing in each other's lives. That makes meaningful gift giving really important.
Its important for both partners to spend money on each other. I think its often assumed that the breadwinner in the relationship is the only one that is expected to spend money on dates and gifts. But if both partners make regular significant investment in one another, they help their chances of a longer and brighter future.

Word Laces Review

 When Apple Arcade originally launched in September 2019, it had 71 games to download and play. When you open the app store today you can pull up the full list of games in their original release order. If you scroll to the VERY bottom of the list, you'll find Word Laces, which in my estimation makes this the first game released for the service.

It seems somewhat symbolic actually, that a casual, innocent, lighthearted little word game would be the first that Apple put on the list. It seems like it almost communicated the intent of the service itself. 
Apple launched their Arcade service at a time when mobile gaming had long since become a cesspool of micro-transactions and ads. If you look carefully, it almost seems like Word Laces was sort of designed to exist in that kind of world. The game as it exists now is beautiful, simplistic and minimalist...and it actually feels kind of weird. There are only two game modes here, one of them offers 1 puzzle per day in the form of a daily challenge, and the other is just the normal mode you'll play, going level by level, solving the word puzzles. No fluff. Once you complete a puzzle, there's no ads or stupid fake money to spend. You just go to the next puzzle.

To look at the gameplay, Word Laces sums itself up exactly. You combine words using shoe laces. You'll see a variety of letters on the screen and sometimes combinations of letters, and you tie them together, in a string, to produce a word that represents or describes the picture you see on the screen. Within five seconds you'll know EXACTLY how to play this game. 

The puzzles are short and sweet, normally lasting about a minute or two. and once you finish you'll earn stars based on how many hints you used, not necessarily how efficient you were. I really liked that the game didn't pressure or rush me. After completing a puzzle you can always go back and do it again, should you so desire, and to compliment the main 1200 puzzle campaign mode, there is a daily puzzle as well, which I found to be much trickier than any of the 50 puzzles I've completed in the main mode.
For being such a simple game, I have to admire its breadth. 1200 is a LOT of puzzles. I've been playing this game with some intensity for over a week. I feel like I've been mainlining it in my spare moments. Having completed 50 of the 1200 puzzles, I feel like I've done a lot, though in the grand design of the game I haven't even hit 10% That might seem like a low number to justify a review...but honestly, I feel like I've seen enough of this game to know what it is. That doesn't make it bad. But it does make it kind of basic. 

I don't want to sound harsh. This is a pleasant little puzzler. I'm legitimately going to keep this on my phone. It's one of the best games I've seen on Apple Arcade that will start up in ten seconds, and lets me complete a puzzle in a minute or two. Play sessions in Word Laces can be REALLY short if you want them to be. On a computer or a game console that might not seem attractive, but on a phone, its awesome. This is a GREAT toilet game.

The stars you earn can be used to earn shoe boxes. When you finally earn a shoe box, you'll be rewarded with a random shoe, which has a corresponding lace for you to wrap your words with, and it also slightly changes the color of the background to add some variety. Its essentially a little bonus to change the color scheme and style of the game board while you play. Its a cute addition, as it always feels good to be earning something, but it really doesn't amount to much, and it certainly won't be the primary motivator to your continued play experience. The reason you will start this game up is the pleasure you get out of the puzzles, and that alone. 

Its worth saying before we end this conversation that I started playing this game on my iPhone. The next day I downloaded it on my Mac to see if it played any differently. I expected to start over, but actually my save file was perfectly synced with my phone, without me doing anything, or really even knowing that it was happening. Heck, I didn’t even know that was a feature. But as soon as I started the game on my Mac, the game started on the exact same puzzle I had been working on on my iPhone. I’m not sure how many Apple Arcade games do this, but if this is a feature that is common, its a really fantastic quality of life feature. But I digress, lets get back to the review.

Word laces is a little treat, neatly wrapped and thoughtfully presented. It's not the greatest word game ever made, but it doesn't have to be. Its a bite-sized shoebox of clever fun, and if you're even a casual fan of puzzle games, this one is worth a download.

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

Metal Gear Solid V is a game with weight and great significance. It has been, up to its release, a clear final hoorah from Kojima and team. It has been years since a game with such significance is accompanied by headlines of a parent company giving a big middle finger to their developers. But then you must consider that both sides are undoubtedly jaded. Konami has reportedly spent 5 years and 80 million dollars on the project, and Kojima and Team are working around the clock to deliver an experience that ultimately makes their mother company more money than it does them, while also trying to remove the credit of the game to whom it is due. Being so close to launch and the biggest project any of them have undertaken, its only natural that tensions would be high.

Still, it takes pressure to make diamonds. Metal Gear Solid 5 has escaped development and has been released with celebration and accolades. There has never been a stealth or action game like it. What it accomplishes in its presentation and in its moment to moment gameplay isn’t just an achievement. It is a milestone for storytelling and for gaming in general. In a few years time September 2015 will be remembered by gamers and the industry as a turning point in the PS4 and Xbox One life cycle, not just for the benchmarks in next generation technology, but for a new standard of greatness in videogames. It is a game that suggests conversation now, as well as a few years from now, when we can fully understand its impact on the medium. Already, MGS5 has soiled the experience of what would otherwise be considered fantastic AAA titles of the holiday season, because there just isn’t any way this experience is going to be topped.

Afghanistan, the game’s first setting, is a beautiful country. For Veteran MGS players, it presents a battlefield that has never been fought on. For newcomers, it's recognizable and accessible. But no matter where you’re coming from, it feels fresh.The mountains block off wide open areas, every one subtly leading to a choke point that becomes an enemy check point or base. No matter where you’re going in Afghanistan, you’re always headed toward action. That’s one of the great accomplishments in MGSV’s design: there is always something happening right in front of you and everything you take away from the enemy becomes something that you can use against them. I can steal a jeep from them and move around the countryside ala GTA. But once I’m done in Afghanistan I can also ship that jeep out and use it back at my base, and then when I return to the field of battle I can re-deploy it.

The last couple of years have been filled with open world games. And here we have yet another. But what MGSV does different is how the open world continuously directs you and then frees you to play the game how you want. As you travel, you will inevitably travel toward the enemy. The game almost MAKES you infiltrate bases. When you arrive at the base, however, the cuffs come off and you’re free to do as you please, whether you want to play this game like a shooter or a stealth/action thriller is entirely up to you, and both choices are going to work out pretty well for you. Perhaps the finest topping on the cake is that the decision to go loud or quiet is often made on the fly, and can change multiple times throughout the mission. What makes that fun is that the game doesn’t punish you for it, it just asks you to improvise.

When you do improvise, you will find a deep, glorious bucket of variety; the kind you can sink your teeth into. Its very reasonable to expect to do every mission in the game two or three times. And since the missions are varied, with wildly different objectives, all taking place at different bases with different variables and obstacles, the gameplay is a virtuous cycle of creativity, improvisation and fun.

There are kinks in the armor. It should be brought up that the game’s portrayal of the “main” female character is adolescent and unamusing. At every chance, the camera focuses on her feminine body, and has a poor excuse for making her walk around in a slim bikini. For a soldier, she has an awful lot of swing in her hips, and the scenes she stars in limit her to being a caged pole dancer. On the battlefield, she is a worthy foe. Off the battlefield, she is a sex symbol. I really wish that in 2015 we could get passed something as simple as this. But every time she comes up, it is a scene with missed potential. For a game that is so skilled at discussing adult topics, seeing Quiet onscreen just brings me back to high school, when my friends and I gawped at anything that had legs.

The disappointment that the character Quiet carries is a similar downer that you’ll encounter when your expectations for the game’s story are dropped into a mud pit. It begins with Hollywood bravado and then evolves into a sort of nuclear-soup; a by-product of something that was supposed to be powerful and threatening but now just takes up space in a warehouse. Sickening as the thought is, Metal Gear Solid 5 won’t be remembered for it’s story, yet it may be remembered as the greatest Metal Gear Solid game.

The Metal Gear Series has always excelled at storytelling-off the wall as they all may have been. Yet in telling their stories, they also sacrificed good design. After all, people may remember MGS2 fondly, but the fact of the matter is that you couldn’t play the game for ten minutes in any capacity before coming across a cut scene that led to an urgent and mandatory objective. Metal Gear Solid 3 forced a stealthy slog through the forest, transitioning to a pause screen where you equipped some new clothing so you could cross a river and then repeat the process after you’ve crossed said river. Metal Gear Solid 4, as much of a masterpiece as that was, was a movie. Period. They were all excellent games, but  They were games that pushed you forward. In doing so, they each killed all the motivation of returning to the story for multiple play-throughs.

The Phantom Pain takes a left turn that no one suspected; it finally embraced that fans weren’t interested in watching Snake anymore-they just wanted to play as him. It comes as perhaps the simplest of all video game design decisions, yet the impact that it has had on this game is astonishing. It’s finally fun to PLAY metal gear. “Play” is the perfect word for it too, because once the story is completed and you’re left with nothing but the ambition for growth, the game becomes a playground that you want to return to every Saturday. You know those monkey bars that you swung on all the time? It was fun to just go across them the way they were intended, but on the second week you started skipping bars. On the third week you were hanging upside down, and on the fourth week you started jumping off of them.

Each base in The Phantom Pain will be revisited multiple times, but each time you come back you’re going to do things just a little bit different-just to shake things up. When you do, you’ll find that the gameplay continues to become deeper and more creative than you originally gave it credit for, even 100 hours in.

The good far outweighs the bad. Mostly because the way fans will remember this game as the best in the series has very little to do with the story. It is the finest culmination of the ideas and gameplay innovations that has characterized Metal Gear Solid in the last 30 years. It is the ultimate realization of the tactical/espionage/action gameplay. Maybe it wasn’t what I wanted; But I think what I wanted wasn’t really what I needed. After all, the real story of the Metal Gear Solid saga ended with 4. We all knew it. When the fifth entry was announced, the last thing on our minds was the story. So it was before we ever played it, and so it will be long after we put it down-but that gameplay-man, that was something special.

The Real Value of PS Plus

You've been told to put your money where your mouth is. So you do, and before you know it, you're investing your life savings in renewable diapers.

Seriously though, crappy jokes are one thing, but there is a lot of merit to the idea of "putting money" where one's pie hole is. Behind the saying is the idea that if you REALLY believe in something, or you REALLY want something to happen, you'll actually throw money at it. That's significant because money is the one thing most people have a hard time giving up.

And the value of money, while different for everyone, is also significant to everyone. So when someone tells you that something is "free" your ears are of course going to perk up. Everyone's ears perk up at the idea of getting something for free.

Playstation Plus gives players free games. Sony very cleverly shrouded PS Plus by first providing it as a perk for loyal customers, but then eventually made it mandatory for playing online. Most gamers aren't worried about the idea, because Sony butters up the situation with some legitimately good games every month at no charge.

Most of my Playstation library is made up of PS Plus games because I'm one of those guys who works a retail job and barely has any expendable income to pay for a full priced retail title. To me, PS Plus is a great opportunity to have fresh games coming in all year that can keep me playing, interested, and challenged for less than the cost of a full priced game. It's almost the only way I can get new games under the income bracket I live on. Even when I come across more money, I put it toward real things that matter-like working on a broken car or buying necessary things for my wife and children.

As it happens, as much as I enjoy games on PS Plus, I also don't play them that much any more. I have had to think long and hard about how I love Spelunky so much, and admire the storytelling of Ether One, and love the gameplay mechanics of Rocket League, and appreciate the efforts of Never Alone. Truth is, when I have a couple hours to enjoy a game, I don't want to play any of those. The only reason I can come up with as to why I'm not interested in picking them up is because I actually invested nothing in them in the first place. I got all of those games for free. Because of that, enjoying them or getting something out of them doesn't create any consequence.

To nail this point down, I purchased Guacamelee: Super Turbo Championship Edition from Nintendo's Humble Bundle for $1.00 (I know, I'm a cheapskate. But I made sure every penny went to the developer.) I played it for an hour, enjoyed it and then set it down so that I could focus on beating Splinter Cell. One month later, the game came out on PS Plus. I downloaded it for free, and I never started it up. I never have any INTENTION of starting it up.

I like the game. I'm actually looking forward to playing it on my Wii U. But I still won't play it on my Playstation, even if the Playstation version allows me to earn trophies and play online with my friends. I don't care. I actually paid money for the Wii U version. I invested in it. I put my money into it. In my mind, the Wii U version is worth more.

I know that we are technically "paying" for PS Plus games because we pay for the membership and the games are part of a membership. I understand that. But the fact of the matter is that Sony actually just wants money to support their network and they use the games to sweeten the deal and keep people subscribed. If PS Plus money only went toward online play and data backup features, the majority of subscribers would drop their subscription for 6 months out of the year.

The truth is that with any game, or any item for that matter, we value things more when we actually pay for them. Free things might be cool, but they're also worthless, because you didn't assign any value to them in the first place.

I have always enjoyed Mario games. I loved Super Mario World and Super Mario Sunshine and the New Super Mario Bros on Wii and DS. More than any of those games, I've played and loved New Super Luigi U, and Mario 3D Land (on which I obtained 5 stars on my play file). The only reason I love those games more is because I paid for them. And I want to keep returning to them because, in a way, they are giving back to me what I put into them.

Playstation Plus is still cool, and I will still subscribe, but I don't really value the idea of free games like I used to. The fact is that I want to put my money in the things I REALLY want and REALLY believe in. And those are the games that I forked over money for.

Growing Up Slowly

I wouldn't call myself a baby Christian anymore. I've seen enough, heard enough and read enough to be well-versed in the Christian life.

That's what I want to think. It's what I want to believe.

Then, as I was driving home from work, I realized that I actually haven't lived an independent Christian life. Throughout my growing years I was always living with another Christian who was spiritually older then me. They were the ones who would remind me that Sunday was coming up and that I should go to church, or that it would be ideal to attend to Wednesday night prayer service.

When I was actually alone, with no other Christians to remind me of how Christian's ought to live, I would go back to my old ways and forget what day it was. I would forget to read my Bible and pray, I would forget about the Christian artists that I would listen to all the time around my Christians brothers and sisters. I would ALMOST act like I wasn't saved.

When I first realized how I had been living for the last 4 years since I've been out of college, I actually wondered if I was legitimately saved, but I remember so clearly the day I prayed and asked for salvation. Just as clearly, I remember a few times where I prayed the salvation prayer again, just in case I wasn't authentic the first time. I'm definitely saved. I think what I have been living is just a lack of personal accountability to my own self. It's a lack of spiritual maturity.

Punctuality is extremely important to me, especially when going to work or arriving at a meeting. That is a grown up feeling and a mature sense of responsibility. Strange then that I have always felt almost zero pressure to be at Sunday School on time, or to even attend at all. It's just a lack of maturity because, spiritually speaking, I've never seen the big deal about being late.

It only hit me because I just got done visiting my best friend Tim Cunningham. He has always been an old soul, but his spirituality is also far ahead of his physical age. Seeing the leadership and focus that he brought to his family was inspiring, especially since the full credit could be pointed to God before Tim even said anything. He has a career that would drive any woman insane, especially considering the time he puts into it, but his relationship with God seems to trump any negative aspects it could have on his relationship with his wife, Julie (also a dear friend to me).

I won't get into too much detail about Tim's life. If you want to know more you can visit his website at www.cunninghamfineart.com. But I say it all to say that everything that I lack in my life compared to Tim is entirely because Tim has a closer relationship with God than me. And the only reason Tim has a closer relationship with God than me is because, up until this point in my life, I never embraced my Christian walk as my own personal responsibility.

I hope I can turn this responsibility into a real relationship with God that is independent, self evident and real. I also hope God will unite my family and draw them closer to Him through my relationship with Him.

Here we go.