Monday, April 1, 2013

I Am a Non-Believer

As my regular readers know I came into this new technological age kicking and screaming. I hate it! I have fought every new thing that has come along. I put off learning how to use it until the world got too strong for me. It has become almost impossible to keep up with anything if not plugged in somehow. So I have painstakingly (let’s put emphasis on the “pain” part of that word) struggled to learn how to use today’s tech.


And I have come to understand one of the things that held me back. It is simply this- I don’t believe in it. I’m not talking about why we need it so much. It is ruining us as human beings. I already know how I feel about that. No, I’m talking about the actual technology of it. It doesn’t make any sense to me. It is totally beyond my ability to grasp more than just a fleeting glimpse of how it works. It doesn’t seem possible.

For crying out loud, I am still in disbelief of how a telephone works. Not a cell phone, just a plain old fashioned land line. It has always been a miracle that I could pick up a phone and my voice would travel through wires across the miles and come out at the other end. It is impossible for me to comprehend.

Now the world is asking me to believe that not only my voice but all my messages and news travel through the air in little particles until they are caught up by the right equipment and brought to someone else. It sounds like a Willy Wonka invention. It is impossible for me to comprehend. I don’t believe in it.

Cameras and movies have always amazed me but they used to have film and development and pictures you picked up. Now I am asked to believe that I can take pictures with a phone, plug it into a computer and voila! There my pictures magically appear on the screen. There is nothing concrete to get a hold of! I don’t believe in it. I truly don’t.

But the evidence is all around me. I see phones in use, texts flying back and forth, pictures shared on Facebook, my blog going to readers all over the world, I get to interact with my grandchildren on Skype, the list is endless. I do not comprehend the technology but I see it working all around me.

And so it is with God. There are so many today who say they do not believe in Him but the evidence is all around them. Today’s technology doesn’t care if I don’t believe in it. It is there all the same. It doesn’t matter if you believe in God. He is there all the same.

I found this poem “God’s Witnesses” written many years ago by Charles Hanson Towne: “I need not shout about my faith. Thrice eloquent are quiet trees and the green listening sod; Hushed are the stars, whose power is never spent; The hills are mute: yet how they speak of God!”

And this “The Evidence” by John B. Tabb: “In every seed to breathe a flower. In every drop of dew To reverence a cloistered star Within the distant blue; To wait the promise of the bow Despite the cloud between, Is Faith- the fervid evidence Of loveliness unseen.”

It is springtime in my little part of the world. The birds are singing, the trees are blooming out, my early spring flowers are nodding their heads to the morning, and all is right in God’s world. I wish I could say the same for mans. That’s the view from my side of the street, what’s yours?

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