An
Inkling
He
said, “I suggest that you not go to Las Vegas anytime soon.” I was at the Apple store, and he had just
explained to me that yes, in addition to my usual hard drive going bad, so had
my back up hard drive. Two gone bad in
one week! How could that be? He attributed it to bad luck – thus his Las
Vegas advice.
I
find a more helpful paradigm in the Genesis 11 story of the Tower of
Babel. You remember the story. Each of those early Genesis chapters shows
how life continued to unravel after our forebears chose to live apart from the
One in whose image they were made. In
Genesis 11 that unraveling manifested as confusion, which arose as they sought fame
through building a tower that reached the heavens.
I
have a picture of that tower in my office.
Why? Because it explains so much
of what I see in the world and in my own life:
apart from God we can only build so high before confusion breaks out –
sooner or later, every time.
As
computers have improved we have forgotten just how high we are stacking the
byte bricks in our tower. I had about
300 gigabytes of information on my hard drive.
As a reminder: a byte stores a character of text; a kilobyte – 1000
bytes – stores about 20 lines of text; a megabyte – 1000 kilobytes – stores
about 400 pages of text, which comprises a long book; and a gigabyte – 1000
megabytes – stores about 1000 long books.
So do the math – on my little hard drive I had stacked the equivalent of
300,000 long books. And we won’t even bother
with terabytes, petabytes, etc.
If
it hadn’t been bad sectors on the hard drives, it would have been a power surge
or a virus or… you name it. Sooner or later, every time, confusion finds
its way into towering human achievements.
It’s how life works in a broken world.
When
we talk about our need for a Savior usually we have in mind some bottom
dwelling behavior. But in this world
even our towering achievements need a Savior – be they cyber, spiritual,
relational, political, or something solid enough to hold in your hand.
We
have such a Savior! Thanks be to God.
Blessings,
Keith
