When you were a kid, did you ever want something so badly you couldn’t think about anything else? Did you ever dream about something so vividly you were sure that it had to be true?

You know what I’m talking about, right? Did you ever have that Ralphie-Parker-Red-Ryder-BB-gun yearning? Everything else takes a back seat to your obsession?

And if I phrase it as “an obsession,” automatically, we get a little defensive, don’t we?

“I have goals and desires, not obsessions. Obsessions are for people who fixate on things like ‘Pizza-gate’ and listen to InfoWars.”

Fine, I’ll back off of obsession. Did you ever pursue something so single-mindedly that nothing else mattered? You don’t give your family the time they deserve? Your job starts to seem like an inconvenient obstacle between you and your passion. When you’re in the midst of your reverie, time slips away, and you can’t be sure how long you’ve been checked out.

When I was in grad school, I was given my first computer. It came from a woman at the church where I was a youth minister. Her husband, who had been an engineer at Sperry, died unexpectedly—and his state-of-the-art computer was sitting in his old study collecting dust.

She knew I was getting ready to write my thesis and asked if I’d like to have it. Pffft! Of course, I’d like to have it!

The thing was premium hardware, running MS-DOS on a 20-megabyte hard drive. I was introduced to Word Perfect, a word-processing program back in the day. This was better than anything I could possibly imagine. You could just use the backspace key and erase stuff. You could take whole paragraphs—heck, whole pages, and chapters—highlight them and move them around. They called it cutting and pasting—which was entirely up my alley because I grew up in an analog age—and I could cut and paste with the best of them—with, you know, actual scissors and paste.

Word processing was like having a personal genie available to magically produce your every wish. It had this thing—you could go through your whole paper, and it would check your spelling for you. I think the phrase the kids use these days is spellchecker. And if you added a footnote in the middle of the manuscript, Word Perfect would renumber the rest of the footnotes accordingly—without having to type everything all over again.

I’d learned how to type, went through all of college, and the first half of my master's degree pounding away on a typewriter. So, the beautiful sorcery of word processing was like Disney Magic™ It immediately made everything I thought I knew about writing obsolete.

But it wasn’t only word processing. What really sold me on the technology boom was that I could play Dungeons and Dragons—like, right on the computer. To a nerdy grad student, this epiphany was like discovering the cure for cancer. I played night and day … literally, all night and all day. If it weren’t for my wife doing an intervention, archaeologists might one day find my remains in Northeast Tennessee, wrapped around that Sperry monitor, with Pepsi bottles scattered around my shallow grave, sprinkled with Dorito dust and despair.

But Susan did intervene. She said, “You are addicted.”

I said, “That’s ridiculous. It’s a game. I could quit any time I want.”

She crossed her arms and stepped between me and the computer screen.

“Excuse me,” I said. “You’re in my way.”

Nothing. She didn’t even budge.

“Look, woman! Let me pass. Those Orcs aren’t going to kill themselves.”

Looking back on it, I was pretty pathetic. I wanted to play that game so badly that I quit eating meals, going outside, and talking to my wife. Even when I was away from the game, I’d be thinking about battle campaigns, what kind of spells I should cast, and how many hit points I’d have to sacrifice if I wanted to kill the dragon.

For one brief period, my reality was shaped by my desire to play that game. The rest of my existence was blinkered, overwhelmed by that longing.

I suspect it’s that kind of longing that gets Peter in trouble in our Gospel today. The disciples have been following Jesus for a while now, and Jesus checks in with them, “You’ve been with me for some time now. You must have heard the word on the street. Who do people say that I am?”