iGod

Too busy to read this? All the more reason.

This last week I just had to get things fixed.

Life was becoming stressful. My laptop was not synching with my other devices, so it meant that when I put a date in my diary it would go missing or not carry over properly.

I knew things had gone desperately wrong when I realised that I had to be in three places at one time.

So having had tinkered around on my laptop for long enough and reading various geeky online conversations, I booked an appointment to see a Technician in the Genius Bar at my nearest Apple Store. This is fancy language for saying an “in-store IT guy who knows a lot more than me”, as much as it pains me to say I hasten to add.

Looking at my diary on different devices, he asked which one was my master diary. “Haven’t a clue”, came my muffled reply.

After much clicking and sighing, he awe-inspiringly managed to bring all my various calendars together in one place. Towards the end he look up and said, “You sure have an active calendar!” Which was euphemistic for saying ,”Sheesh! I wouldn’t want your life, mate!”

We have entered the period that the Church calls Lent. It is traditionally a 40-day period when Christians spiritually prepare for Easter. It mirrors the time that Jesus spent in the Wilderness without food and water being tempted by the Devil. Christians often use the 40-day opportunity to abstain from something as part of their spiritual discipline to keep prayerfully engaged throughout the time.

It gives space to reflect on our part in Christ’s death. A time of year when we focus our thoughts on our human fragility and remember that we are “dust.” As the first book of the Bible says, “From dust we were made and from dust we shall return. We remember our capacity to be selfish, cruel and weak. And we remember that despite humanity’s great achievements, we are fragile, vulnerable human beings.

Creating time and space to reflect isn’t easy. Just recently I have begun to re-read a book called Too Busy Not to Pray. I have been waiting patiently for a sequel, To Busy to Read Too Busy Not to Pray, but alas still not forthcoming.

Prayer, he says, is an unnatural activity. We are forced to learn from an early age the rules of self-reliance and struggle to achieve self-sufficiency.  It is the complete opposite to all that we are ingrained to think and do. Therefore, making time to pray doesn’t come easily.

So what does prayer do?

Well, that’s a big question, but one of the things is achieves is a sacred space in our busy day that allows God to speak to us and we to communicate with him. It also gives us the gift of de-cluttering the mind with unimportant things that vie continuously for our attention like a demanding child.

If we take the possibility of prayer seriously the busyness of our lives may just start to improve also our emotional health. (Actually, medical research has proved this to be the case.) It will start to help us prioritise our values.

There is an old hymn by Emily May Grimes Crawford, which has the moving words: “Speak, Lord, in the stillness while I wait on Thee.  Hushed my heart, to listen in expectancy".

Where is your stillness to be found? Do you need to slow down and cool off on a few things? Because if you discover an IT techie telling you that you have a very “active diary” a reflective prayer life might just help to save you.

 

ASD

Christmas Olympics

A dear friend of ours Helene from All Souls, Twickenham, always manages to raise a smile with her creative Christmas cards. Thought it worth posting to share the Christmas love wider.

Hope you are all well into the Christmas by now. I know we are are at SVV.

ASD

Life Version 2.0

(My article reproduced from Community News)

I have a love-hate relationship with technology. I love it when it makes my life easier, but absolutely hate it when it interferes with my routine and it becomes the master, not the servant.

Quite unabashed, I have been an Apple Mac user ever since my second year at ‘vicar factory’ back in the early 90s. Before then I kindly borrowed someone’s Toshiba Portable MS DOS computer, which in truth wasn’t that portable. Not only was it heavy and left dents in my knees, but the battery life was shorter than a queue to the Crazy Paving Appreciation Society’s Annual Lecture.

Nowadays, alongside my lighter laptop, I also have my mobile or should I say ‘smart phone’, but as I discovered recently this has not been without its problems.

I attempted to upgrade my phone software to the latest whizzy-whiz, faster, better-than-ever-before version. Also known as iOS 5. In truth, I was not unhappy with how things were before, but the thought of something better and free, well…it was simply an offer I couldn’t refuse.

So on a quiet weeknight I hit the download button to let technology do its best. Unfortunately it decided to do its worst. With a big gasp I watched my entire set of emails, calendars and contacts disappear before my eyes. (And, no, my emails weren’t backed up!) If ever there was a time to find a grown man crying in a corner it was then. The promise of a better-connected life had let me down.

It has made me think how we can often put a lot of blind faith in things that are not necessarily proven, but given enough hype can accept anything as truth. We want to believe that something will make our lives better.

It is natural to want to upgrade the standard of our lives. We can look at the current version and think, “This just sucks! Maybe something has to stopped functioning in our life or we see something in someone else’s and want what they have.

The late Steve Jobs, founder of Apple said famously in a university plenary speech:

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

The immensely successful and talented Steve Jobs recognised his products were not ultimately enough in them self. That is quite something, isn’t it?

Life has a spiritual profundity that modern science still struggles with any integrity to make redundant. There remains this longing in us all to be known, loved and accepted for who we are, not for what we have achieved. Many Christian commentators have called this a God-shaped hole wanting to be filled by himself through his Son Jesus Christ.

If the promises of God are true and Jesus is who he says he is, it requires a full upgrade to a new way of seeing and experiencing life. The old version will never do.

St Augustine, the early church father said rather wryly:

“I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are wise and very beautiful; but I have never read in either of them: ‘Come to me all you that labour and are heavy burdened.’” [quoting Jesus]

Is God’s Life Version any better than the modern alternatives around?

I give the last word to Paul the low-tec Apostle who said this about the great iPriest, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!"

ASD