Faith is weird. What if I don’t have it? How do you get it? Can you grow it? Rom 1:17 says the Good News is “…accomplished from start to finish by faith.” Somehow I have to get it…
I know what I have faith in. My computer. I know that because I get the “blue screen of death” about every 6 weeks. I hate it. If I had no faith in the machine, I wouldn’t be surprised when the blue screen appears. But I’m more than surprised. I’m upset, frustrated, and everyone leaves the office.
When I get the blue screen, I become immediately fixated on all the things that need to get done, and how difficult if not impossible it will be to do them without the computer. Next I freak out considering how long it’s been since I’ve backed up my data – and about the info I will be losing.
Knowing the possessed machine is undependable; you may ask “Why don’t you back it up?” Well, the laptop normally works, I can usually get it going again (it only completely crashes where I can't resurrect it about once a year), I’m a bit lazy, and -- I must have faith it will work. It’s misplaced faith maybe, but it's faith.
So, what is it about my computer that makes me trust it? Why don’t I depend on God like that? I started my journey with God on faith in what He had done for me, why don’t I continue that way? He has never given me the blue screen… Speaking of which,
I need to buy a Mac.
Dan
Hello Dan,
ReplyDeleteyour news letter got me thinking this morning and I was hoping that I may comment on the newsletter, in particular the portion about Faith and computers (Mac...really? lol).
I wonder sometimes if our faith is not like computers more than we realize or care to admit.
My experience with computers started with a Tandy Model 1 running MSDOS 3.5, we used a cassette tape player to save our "programs". The cassette tape drive was very slow and we had to treat it well and with respect or our data would get corrupted. We also used an Apple, it was not even an Apple II, much less the Apple IIe. My favorite was the Tandy Model 1.
When writing a program you had to do everything by hand first, including trouble shooting because there was no "Edit" feature so if it did not work you had to start over. The MSDOS OS (operating system) did not multitask, it could do one thing and one thing only but do it very well and was a very stable OS. The system could run an extremely long time without having to "reboot".
Next came MSDOS 5.0 with the EDIT command now available, woo hoo and yippee. We could now write programs and edit them on the fly dramatically reducing the amount of hand (personal) time required. We now saved our data on a 5 1/4" "floppy". Woo hoo. This was much faster (we did not need to work on our patience as much), could hold more data (640KB) and we could toss them around without respect or damage to our data (mind you putting them too close to a monitor still had drastic effects on our data, we will just call that "sensitivity to external interference").
The first personal computer that I bought had MS Windows 3.11 for networking. Now we had a GUI (Graphical User Interface). This OS could "run" multiple programs at once (though that was really a lie, it really still only ran one at a time but divided it's processor clock cycles between the open programs, the more programs open the slower they ran), we made "network" connections much easier, and our data was now stored on an impersonal, don't need to lay my hands on it, internal hard drive. Writing programs now became an impersonal, tedious, if not monotonous chore, no longer the personal, time consuming art form it had been in it's previous iteration.
Well, of course then we had Win95, Win98, Win NT, Win2000, Win ME (don't even get me started here), Win XP, Vista (yea, the 21st century version of ME) and of course Win7. Yes, even Apple turned into Mac and they had their own OS "upgrades" over time (which I will speak more on in a moment).
It would seem that we as Christians, not unlike human nature in general, tend to find that our Old Time Religion, basic Bible believing Christianity, is not good enough for me. We feel the need to constantly "jazz it up" with more tasks, programs, glitz and glitter often forgetting the "BASIC" programming that was provided for us in the beginning.
(now back to your MAC) We now have the ability to "chose" and/or build a system to meet our every need. This system can run a Windows OS on a Mac OS X subsystem on top of a Linux kernel. So, taking a line from one of my favorite musicals, with "a little bit of this, a little bit of that" we can now "create" our own religion, as it were, where Faith is no longer seen as an art form but an Old School hindrance to our new, modern day "progressive religion/christianity" (yea, no caps on the Christianity).
After seeing this my only prayer is...Lord, please make me a DOS man again, where my one concentration is on You, and my Faith may once again be Your art form.
Anyway Dan, nice thoughts in you news letter...see what you started?