Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's iPod Touch

Bethany College of Missions hosted a contest last week on Twitter. It was really simple. All you had to do was tweet this:

Follow @BCOM_network and RT this + your answer 4 a chance to win an iPod touch: "Where would you do missions?"

...as many times as you wanted. Simple, right? I tweeted about 400 times. Probably closer to 500. All I could think about was getting that iPod touch. Twitter has anti-spam programs, so I couldn't tweet the same answer twice. I'd quickly generate the names of cities and states and countries to put in the answer spot. At first, they were places that I wanted to do missions. Then, places that I thought could use more God. And then, I just started spitting out random answers. Sometimes, for an hour at a time.

The contest ended last Wednesday and the winner was announced on Friday at 2pm. Needless to say, I was anxious to hear the results.

I didn't win. I'm glad.

Did I, at any point in my pointless mass tweeting, ever once seriously think of God and/or missions? The point of the whole contest was to raise interest in mission work, and for people to discover opportunities through BCOM to get plugged into missions. What was my motivation? Was it to bring glory to God and people to hear His calling? Nope. It was an iPod touch.

I have two iPods. I won one from a contest at my school, and the other I got for Christmas. I don't even need an iPod.

But a whole lot of people need God.