WOW! - Tanks, Healers, and DPS - Church Needs Them All

So the other day I was sitting with my sons at the dinner table and my wife and we're going through the Proverbs and anything everything and you know we had come to a few about you know drinking and you know how wine is a mocker and things like that.

And I told a story about to my sons about one of my friends you know when I was younger who has since passed away from a drug overdose and of course I told them in a you know a kid kind of a way and my son looked at me he was very puzzled.

My oldest and he says to me dad if he was a if he was doing bad things why was why was he your friend. And so I was forced to talk to him about how you know daddy wasn't always a good guy and he used to do the bad things with this guy totally blew his mind.

Yeah that's right I wasn't always trying even trying to do the right thing. I wasn't always a believer and you know back at the time when I wasn't a believer I was in my 20s and I was like the prototype consumer you know what I mean like I would I would spend all my money on various things just to kind of you know have fun and enjoy myself but not in a way where you're actually like accomplishing anything you're just spending you're just consuming.

And so you know on the days when I would you know get off work and I wouldn't go to the bar or something like that or go out I'd pick up like a six-pack or something like that and I'd go home and I'd play video games.

And one of the games I really enjoyed and to this day it was still some of the most fun I've ever had was World of Warcraft. And if you don't know anything about World of Warcraft it's a it's an online role-playing game and the whole idea is to cooperate and team up with friends and fight against enemies and all that kind of thing.

And if you if you have played then you know about the different roles you know that you could potentially take most of the things in the game you can you know like the more mundane things like the normal you know fights and things like that and the normal adventures you could do on your own you know it doesn't really matter if you have friends or not.

But if you want to accomplish sort of the more challenging things like the dungeons and the the raids and things like that you have to team up with people. And there's three roles really three primary roles for what you could potentially be every team needs to have these roles or it's pretty much impossible to accomplish the the dungeon or the raid and the roles are as follows.

There's a tank there's a healer and then there's DPS that just means damage per second and obviously the damage per second role that's just your your main mission is to cause as much damage to the enemy as possible and so you're gonna want to find the weapons that deal the most damage that can move the quickest that are able to do put the hurt on people.

The the role of the healer is also pretty obvious that person's role is to make sure that everyone as they start taking damage from enemies you can heal them usually like a magic spell or a potion or something like that and you keep them alive essentially so as they're fighting the enemies you know doing all this damage your role as the healer is to keep them alive and to you know make sure their their hit points are always you know you know enough.

And then the tanks role is very interesting because the tank is supposed to attract the most attacks towards him so he wants to basically be the most aggressive one of the players so that all of the enemies say oh man that's the guy we need to watch out for let's attack him.

So he's drawing basically all of the enemy fire as at least as much as possible and so while he's doing that the healers healing and the damage people are doing their damage and that's how you win. If you don't have one of these roles it's very difficult to win because hypothetically if we had no tank for example then me as the healer I might get attacked myself and if I get attacked and I can no longer heal I have to defend myself.

Then the rest of the party is also getting attacked and their health is depleting and you wipe and same thing with the healer. If you don't have a healer you're gonna wipe because nobody can actually replenish your health effectively enough to do it now there are there's always some overlap right.

Like like there's always going to be some people that have healing abilities and things like that that are their job is DPS or tank but it's it's it's very difficult to to win if you don't have someone focused on one thing everybody has their assigned job and you you stand or fall together essentially which is a lot of what the where the fun comes in with these games anyway.

So when I was playing World of Warcraft I was a healer so that was my job. I had an undead healer who would you know cast these magic spells to make sure that everybody stayed alive. It's a very stressful job relatively speaking because it's just a video game you know obviously there's no there's really no stakes involved here because if you wipe you could always do it again.

You know you start from the safe point you get your health replenished and you can try again. So anyway that that was that was World of Warcraft and me and my brother and my cousins used to have a lot of fun playing that game.

There's a lot of games like this and World of Warcraft is not the only one anyway. The reason why I tell this story is because I think a lot of the angst that we feel when we're fighting you know whether it's online or in real life in churches and things like that a lot of it is driven from the fact that despite it saying so in the Bible we don't really feel like there's different members for the body.

You know what I mean like we don't everyone basically supposed to be doing the same thing and there's some truth to that in the body of Christ. You know we have the same mission you know ultimately our goals are aligned.

But that does not mean we all go about it the same way as a healer. I knew the mission was to defeat the dungeon or to complete the raid. But if I went about it the exact same way as DPS or a tank we would wipe we would fail.

We wouldn't have we wouldn't have success. And it would make no sense for me to say to the tank hey man why aren't you helping me heal. That's my job. You know what I mean it wouldn't make any sense for the tank to look to the DPS saying hey you know why aren't you taking the brunt of this assault.

It's like that's not really their job that's not their role. It wouldn't make any sense to do that. We all kind of knew that we had a certain role and we kind of did it from there. Now there would be times of course that again those roles would overlap.

You know your healer somehow attract some attention and goes down. Well now if you have like a kind of like a healing spell or something like that you got to step in you we got to try to win and so we had different functions and everyone knew what their job was even though we had the same goal.

I gotta be honest like the church is like that in some ways not everybody has to be doing the same things even though we have the same goal. I think of like a tank like someone like Doug Wilson. Right.

Doug Wilson he takes the brunt of a lot of assaults. I think William Wolfe is sort of like this as well. There are certain people that seem to just attract the I era Khan he's another one. They just attract the most vicious assaults and it seems like that's their role.

I don't know if they're self-conscious about this but they just have a knack for attracting enemy attention and I mean enemy like in our ultimate enemies you know the Satan excuse me and his minions the people that that worship him and follow him.

But also our idea of ideological enemies. You know people that are Christian we should have the same mission but there you know we don't. We have sort of different ideologies. Era Khan is great at attracting all that attention and he seems to enjoy it and he seems to be good at it too.

In other words he's able to absorb a lot of the most vicious assaults. And that's important you know. And and we should recognize people like that among us and we we should resist the urge to be the schoolmarm and say naughty naughty Eric you should have worded it more carefully like like that's not his role again.

I don't know if Eric is self-conscious about this or Doug is self-conscious. I think Doug might slight be self-conscious about this. I'm not sure. I've only talked to him one time in my life so I didn't ask him if he was the tank.

But there are guys like this you know what I mean. And so we should not we should not spurn those people. We should not look down upon those people especially you know Doug for example I know a lot of my friends are very frustrated with Doug because he's not attacking in the way we think he should attack.

In fact sometimes it looks like and he is sort of you know you know attacking us. You know what I mean and I don't feel that way about Doug but some people do but I don't think we need to really concern ourselves with that too much.

That's not Doug's role necessarily. Eric Khan I think is the same way and William Wolfe I think is the same way. It doesn't mean they don't attack like like the tanks by the way in in World of Warcraft they're attracting all the enemy attention but they are swinging and striking blows as well.

That's how they that's actually how they attract the attention. But the point is he wants his best damaged people the best fighters to not get attack themselves. They're capable and able to just launch attack after attack after attack after attack and not to worry about defense.

He wants that for the healer as well. And then of course there are guys like you know again in the church and and they're fighting these fights that their DPS you know they're launching attack after attack and they're strategizing and they're they're they're they're they're they're making moves politically and of course you know that's a small impact right now but it's it's growing.

They're they're launching rhetorical attacks again and again and again and they're really good at that. And again it would make no sense as a healer for me to say hey man if you want to win you got a heal.

You know what I mean like you know that that's their that's their role and we shouldn't spurn that and there are people out there that are very good at cutting to the heart of matters you know what I mean and we should acknowledge that and we should be happy about that.

They don't have to do this thing the exact same way that we do this thing. They might use sharper rhetoric than we would use that could be okay. They might use less sharp rhetoric than we would use because they're in certain circles where that's what is required.

You know there's you know people talk about the tweets and things like that you know there are certain circles where you know it wouldn't make sense for them if they're gonna launch a successful attack they're not gonna launch it the same way they would with a meme.

You know what I mean it's the same content and it's the same ideas but it's presented in a way that's gonna be most effective for the context those DPS type people the ones that are launching the attacks their their role is very important.

In fact we need a lot of those people right now just like in World of Warcraft you need a lot of those kind of people. And then of course they're the healers you know what I mean and I think of a guy like Josh Dawes you know where he's just here to help you know and he's he's he's just a really nice guy and I don't mean that as an insult Josh I mean that as a positive.

He's the kind of guy that you know hey they might go on Josh Dawes's podcast our enemies they would never even think about coming to the 80 Robles podcast and that's a good thing too man that is a really good thing.

We need those people as well. You know there's that passage there's that passage in Jude where it talks about you know rescue others by snatching them from the flames of judgment so show mercy still to others but do so with great caution.

There's just different. It's in that case it's talking about different kinds of people. You know of course but I think that there are not only are there different kinds of people that we should be focused on those different things but also there's different allies that are good at each of those things and we shouldn't be worried about that.

We shouldn't be concerned about that stressed out about it fearful troubled all these things. Not everybody has to do it like 80 Robles right. Not everybody has to do it like Josh Dawes. Not everybody has to do it like Eric Khan.

I think that we need a lot of people launching attacks. I think that the DPS role and in World of Warcraft there's mostly that I think that that's what we need right now and we're in a fight. We're in an ideological fight.

It's not you know it's not a flesh-and-blood fight. You know I'm not. I'm not for revolutions and things like that. In fact I completely disavow but that being said this is a this is a time of turmoil that we're facing right now and we need to treat it like that and we need to recognize that people are going to be accomplishing the same goals.

We're gonna have the same targets the same mission but we're gonna be we all have different roles in that mission. Does that make sense. I mean even if you don't like World of Warcraft that maybe that will speak to you.

You know it doesn't make any sense for us to be divided against ourselves. And I think a lot of the stress online is we have healers saying everyone needs to be a healer and it's just not true. It's just not true.

We've got DPS saying everyone needs to be a DPS. That's just not true. We've got tanks thinking that everyone needs to be a tank and it's just not the case. Look I don't like some of the things that dr. James White has said and done lately but at the end of the day dr. James White in my opinion I mean he's got listen there's different sides of each of us.

Right. We're not no one's like a pure healer or a pure DPS or a pure tank. And it's the same way in World of Warcraft again when things are stressed out and and it looks like you're about to lose or about to wipe.

Sometimes the tank needs to jump in and start doing some heals. You know what I mean as simple as that dr. James White often is a healer and so he's not gonna take the hard line on g3 that you think he needs to.

I think that's okay. I think that's okay. And we don't have to be stressed out about it. We don't have to say I'm not gonna follow you anymore or anything like that. That is okay. We need each other guys.

Bottom line we need each other especially now and especially into the future. We don't need to be treating each other like enemies when we have the same mission we have the same goals at least professed we have the same goals.

Everyone has their own role. The Bible teaches this. World of Warcraft teaches this. Although who cares. Right the Bible teaches this. We obviously have a we have moral commands that we must abide by but we need to look at those moral commands of course in the context of Jesus's ministry Jesus's person.

I get this all the time where people are like oh well that doesn't seem very Christlike and I'm like yeah well you know Christ according to that standard isn't very Christlike. You know what I mean. Jesus had different tones.

Jesus had different strategies different words to say to different people and for different purposes. And I want to follow the full example of Jesus Christ who was you know very patient with the woman at the well but direct you know look at the people that were like sheep without a shepherd lots of compassion but was ferocious with the people that were devouring them.

He was ferocious with them and he mocked and he was humorous and he made fun of and he did all of these things like that's the Jesus that really exists. And I personally want to want to love and worship that Jesus.

And I want to follow that example of the actual Jesus as he actually existed not the precious moments Jesus that exists in some school mom's fantasy or you know feminine pastor's fantasy. That's not the Jesus that I want to follow because that's not the Jesus that actually is there.

Anyway. I hope you found this video helpful. I'm being a peacemaker here because 80 Robles is here to help and he's a very peaceful guy sometimes. Anyway let me know what you think I am. Am I a tank in my DPS or my healer because I got to be honest I know myself pretty well and I'm not sure I don't think I'm a healer necessarily.

I think I think that's why I like to be a healer when I was in World of Warcraft because when you're playing a role-playing game oftentimes you want to you know play the persona of someone you're really not.

I think I can be DPS and tank at times. I don't have. I don't think I have enough influence necessarily to be a tank so maybe I'm just a DPS which is which is cool because I'm okay with that. I'm okay with fighting and I'm okay with pulling aggro at times when I need to look up I'm the kind of DPS that like when the tank wipes when he when he when he dies I can be like a like a pseudo tank at times I think that maybe that's my role.

I'm like a DPS with like a subclass of tank anyway I hope you found this video helpful. God bless.