“Lost”Last Saturday I lost my internet connection suddenly at my home. What a drag, right? Why I feel so crippled without an internet connection, I’ll never know, but I do. When I lose my access to instant information, I feel a bit secluded, isolated, alone, adrift. I feel similarly when my area is experiencing a power outage; life just stops. Now, certainly I realize logically that I can get along just fine without the internet; and unlike losing power, it doesn’t really affect my day to day life at home. Oh sure, it makes things more convenient, but the internet is not essential to most of our everyday non-work lives. Like I said, logically I know this, but I felt panicky at the loss of my internet connection; and I needed it re-established, NOW. So I called my cable company who diagnosed the problem over the phone as a piece of faulty hardware that needed replacing. An appointment was made for the next day for a service call. As I waited for the technician to arrive, I thought about working on my bulletin article a bit. Now, admittedly, the internet makes my bulletin article writing much easier, as I can look up Scripture much faster and more efficiently online than I can thumbing through my Bible and my concordance. But I didn’t have an internet connection. So I thought, I’ll just wait until after the technician fixes my problem and then I’ll work on it; it’ll be so much easier, after all. The appointment was quick and successful, and my internet connection was re-established and all was right with the world again. I surfed the web for a while, catching up on e-mail and news, and forgot about writing the bulletin article. Monday passed, and so did Tuesday, and still I hadn’t worked on it. When Wednesday came (my artificial deadline for completing my weekly article), I decided to sit down and start. I will occasionally jot down notes and anecdotes and ideas and put the scribblings in my Bible for when I need inspiration for bulletin article subjects. So I went in the living room to get my Bible. It wasn’t there. I took a quick look on the bookshelves, and in the bedroom, I even looked in the bathroom. Nothing. Admittedly, I also looked in my refrigerator and my freezer; embarrassingly enough, I have found lost items in there before. So it must be in my car. I must have left it there last Sunday morning. I figured that I’d get it out of the car tomorrow, or the next time I’m out. When I did finally check my car, as I suspected, the Bible was there, on the floorboard, half under the front passenger seat. I grabbed it with a sense of relief, but also with a nagging sense of guilt. Guilt about what you ask? When I found my Bible I realized this: that the very minute my internet connection was lost, I knew it; and not only knew it, but couldn’t rest until it was restored, but it took me four days to notice my Bible was missing, and when I did realize it, I was in no hurry to find it. Do you know where your Bible is (I hope you are not checking the freezer)? Do you even feel you need to know where it is? Do you care where it is? You see, we miss the things that we use most. We miss the things that are important to us. We notice when the cable goes out and we miss it; we notice when our internet connection is lost and we miss it; we notice when our dishwasher stops working, and we miss it. We use these things everyday, and we depend upon them. Maybe it’s time we should all start looking at the word of God that same way, too. — Paul Seely, October 9, 2011 |