"Life" - there's not an App for that

Original Post - 10-7-11

I feel compelled to share some thoughts in light of Steve Jobs passing. Thoughts that may be very hard for us to accept and to proclaim to a lost world.  Without question, I can offer up my utmost respect and dignified remorse to Steve's family, his friends and his fans for their loss.  And all of them are fully deserved of their own loss and grief.  And while I fully understand the need to reflect on all his accomplishments and his undeniable success, even still I have been utterly blown away by the responses I have seen and read in the media.

But it's at this very moment in time at this unique juxtaposition of life, death, wealth and success that we can see all that Solomon spoke of in Ecclesiastics, "....meaningless..meaningless "

The morning news shows are filled with stories of how he "changed the world!", and "changed our lives" and interviews with Apple executives and devoted followers leaving flower shrines at Apple stores and how their lives we ever changed by Apple. Facebook and Twitter posts are going rampant on with adorations, and condolences at the world's great loss.

All of Apple's influence and accomplishments is last week's news.  Today's news is about coming to the end of your life.  And if there is anything to see here, it's that 7 billion dollars can't save your life or even sustain your life for one more day. It's that technology will not save us, and that all our empires mean nothing when we leave the earth.  Eventually, all the ipods and all the Macs in the world (even mine) will return back to the silicon from which they came.

The continual notion that He or apple has "changed our lives", should make us ask ourselves, "What is life about?".  Apple is not life (ironically it brought death in the Garden), the things of this world are not life. Jesus alone came that we would have life and have it to the fullest.  And even so you and I and the world fill our lives over and over again with more and more crap hoping that this trip to the well will be the last.

All the "i-world" has exposed is our ever quenching thirst for " i ", (ourselves) to be entertained and to be distracted. For us, life is found in our entertainment, in any way we can fill the silence and interrupt any stillness that may cause us to "really feel" or "really hear".

I've watched people camp out for weeks in the heat of a Texas summer to be the first in line to get a new version of a phone they already have, and that will be available to everyone that same day.  It looks like Zaccaeus climbing up a tree, or friends of a leper on the roof lowering their friend down to get the new Ipad at times in these stores.  The same zeal for the search of life, but that well will not bring life, you'll need to keep going back to draw water. (by design).  If your life has been changed by instant access to your entire music collection, or a computer that fits in your purse or by Angry Birds, then where was your life to begin with?

I will never forget the time I was at the Grand Canyon watching an amazing sunset.   I couldn't help but to notice one girl amongst the entire crowd. Hers was the only head not peering out into the vast canyon. No hers was bowed down deep into her lap doing something else, something very intently. And then she shrugged to the side, seemingly annoyed by everyone else in the isles and I could see what it was that she was so reverently connected to, a Nintendo gameboy. I sat in amazement as the sun was setting and noticed she had never lifted her head, not even for a moment. Never did she even glance at one of the most beautiful places on earth.  Eventually the crowd at the canyon's edge were too distracting, so she actually turned her back to the canyon and the crowd, perhaps to get a better shadow and contrast on her 3 inch game screen. And as sad as I became to see a generation that seemed so lost that they could not disconnect for one moment of man-made entertainment, I was even sadder to think that they could not even recognize anything that wasn't.

So when I reflect on Steve Jobs I ask the question that Jesus asked.

"What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?" - Jesus

> 

>I did not know Steve nor do I know what his last moments entailed (I am not his judge), but by all accounts he was an eastern religion spiritualist or Buddhist.   At the moment of our death nothing done in our life will matter, no greatness we leave behind will mean anything.  We will be face to face with the God of the universe who will look for our name in the book of life written in blood red ink from Jesus alone, the author of life.

There's not an 'App' for that.

Glory to the King of Kings alone!

Thoughts on Africa…Common threads that Cloth us.

Walk east across the tight rope of the equator until you’re standing over Africa’s largest inland lake, hop off the rope and walk north through the hilly jungle until you reach 2 °- 46’ North 32°-18’ East. You’ve just arrived at the coordinates for Gulu, Uganda. It’s on the map, it’s in the news, but most undoubtedly it’s “off the grid”.

The U.S. Embassy’s standard quote hums drearily off the state department’s bureaucratic voice, “we advise you not travel to the Gulu district. If you cross the Nile (northern Uganda) we can not help you, and we will not be responsible for you. If you do go, write your last letter to your family.”

I didn’t write that letter. But I had five hours alone on a bus traveling there from the Ugandan capital of Kampala to think about my destination and continue all my fanciful expectations. What does a war zone look like? What scars will a refugee camp etch into my mind? Why do we reach our hands down into the valleys of death?

To be sure, this place was a sense of a city in its crudest form, to what appeared to be a leftover Hollywood set that muddled “Escape from New York” with “Black Hawk Down” upon a landscape I would never imagine, because it wasn’t Hollywood and it wasn’t my imagination. It was all very real, with real lives, real people and the same very real God that rules over my world, ruled there.

Imagine the red lunar sands of Mars and place a blanket of lush green jungle softly on top of it. It’s as if you could pull pack the jungle off the crimson desert floor just long enough for cloud of dust to get caught in your eyes, wincing you back to grab your eyes to let the jungle blanket back down. Here there are no roots and the blanket seems to move at will and if you pull up on it fast enough and hard enough, I’m sure you could throw it quickly back to the ground, sending a ripple wave out across the table cloth landscape.

Two seemingly incompatible landforms are brought together here, converging in a dramatic red green contrast and a surprising juxtaposition of the unfamiliar. And amazingly almost everything around me became illuminated by the very same diverging distinctions.

Walking in black Africa as a white westerner is enough obvious contrast, but being in a place that serves as the convergence of every NGO (non-governmental organizations) imaginable, as a veritable convention for UNICEF, Save the Children, World Vision, the UN and on and on like a circus parade of white washed hands on a dark broken land. And in that I found myself talking and meeting person after person drawn to this place and drawn to a cause. And like the red sand and green jungle I have yet to comprehend and understand the disparity of those called by God and serving with the very hands of Jesus to those who know no God and yet give their lives for something ultimately for their own life or for something I can not understand outside of Christ. And I am haunted by wanting to know the honest motivations in my life at home in a landscape without contrast where distinction is difficult.

For twenty years in Northern Uganda there has been what we term ‘a war’, and yet the conflict would be merciful at best if it were only fought with guns and soldiers. Instead, this has been two decades of death, horror, rape, mutilation on levels the human soul cannot comprehend and at a level that deals not merely with waging governments but the very the principalities of a demonic world against flesh and blood. And out of that desert of blood, grows the fertile fields of reconciliation unlike any place on earth. I’ve never know reconciliation to be anything we as humans and certainly not as cultures have ever known. Our world and our lives and our fundamental tenants of society stand on justice and vindication, and yet almost at a scale that only points to the disparity of the world that Jesus reconciled in his own sacrificial death, is the heart of a whole people group with hearts and arms huddled to receive the very ones who have rapped and murdered their own.

Walking through the IDP (internally displaced peoples) camp where ten of thousands of people forced from their homes and villages and put into an African Mondrian masterpiece grid network of traditional African huts, is a wonderfully surreal scene. You’d expect the tight density of living to be equally a tight and potent sense of despair, and yet while they lived with merely nothing at least from my eyes I felt joy, contentment, hope and dignity. Like spreading wildfire, news of our arrival spread quickly across network of children. And in a scene that I shall never forget, a small sea of children would rush towards you with wide eyes and looks of amazement at the sight of something so different and so amazing to them. In their amazement and curiosity the children would all keep a safe distance just out of arms reach. It wasn’t until I would reach out my own hand that they would stare in amazement, reach out to touch my own hand and then look up slowly at me with the face that only the innocence of a child can illuminate with joy only the heart that knows nothing of entitled comforts and everything that are gifts of providence can reflect. Like moving your hands across a ripened wheat field, touching each child if only for a moment, was a harvest of joy and amazement that swept through the village. As I strolled through the village taking time to kick around wound up balls of garbage that became a child’s world cup day dream. I would turn around to see a wake of children following me like the pipe piper. I couldn’t help but to feel like Jesus himself as throngs of people enamored with your mere presence and waited for just a touch of your cloak. But I wasn’t a Messiah bringing healing and I wasn’t bringing eternal truth with great signs and wonders, I was just there as a man as their friend. You couldn’t help but to feel if they had untied that colt and had palm fronds to spare they would create that triumphant entry for you. And yet all I could see was myself in their faces. Like me I stand at a distance from so many things, just being amazed, thinking I’m unworthy to touch and feel God and yet He extends not only his hand but his whole person, crouching down to write in the dirt, tying up the ball of unimportant things for me to play with. And while the throngs of people walk cautiously behind him in his wake, I long to be the one up on his shoulders. But you have to trust in the hand that is extended. You have to get over the shame of your own filthy hands to touch a hand that’s clean. And I think we all know the extent to which he has extended his own hands, hands with nails.

Back below where our Embassy would again regain responsibility down in the capital city, the landscape changed as the jungle took dominance over the desert floor and the grandeur of hills rolled up and around the Victorian Lake shores. The great symphonies of contrasts however, never changed. The people in and around the world of my friends’ orphanage weren’t shackled by insurmountable burdens but living fully alive lives of service and sacrifice. The utter joy of the children and their angelic singing can quell the restless heart of any man, even mine.

And in my own friends there in whom I spent so much time with, with so many conversations I will forever cherish, I learned even more how God wants us to love our own world that is immediately near and around us. The “great commission” wasn’t to send us merely to “great distances” but it is to share something great; himself, to the “whole world” around you. Inside that “whole world” are broken relationships, life long fears and uncomfortable places we don’t want go to. But “go” is the first directive in the great commission. So you don’t have to “go” to Uganda, but you may have to “go” somewhere with a friend, a spouse, a conversation or with yourself to share the good news of freedom.

You only have to look to the simplicity of the game of soccer; travel the world during the World Cup season, and you will find every one on this planet shares common threads. The child that has his mom in her shinny Lexus SUV drop him off at Frisco’s latest complex for his select team practice, runs toward the ball with the same expectations that the Black Muslim child on Zanzibar who just waited for low tide to go out to spear two sticks in the sand and borrow a fisherman’s net for a goal has. And huddled under cardboard tents to watch the one television within ten square miles, entire families stand in the glow of the game under an African sky whilst our Tevos back home make sure our HD sets don’t miss a minute of a match half a world away.

Perhaps the greatest irony in all that I became to know was how a world so literally toxic; where disease, viruses, parasites and bacteria are imminent at every moment and in every event, can take a person from a completely sanitized world and leave him cleansed and washed in places he had not known needed reaching.

I expected to be forever changed by experiencing, even if only as a spectacle, loss and despair. And what I found in the lushness upon that desert floor was faith, hope and love. and the greatest of these is love.

I will forever be in awe at the ones in whom the whole world rushes to help, to heal and to teach. Are themselves the very ones to whom are the givers of provision, of restoration and of learning.

So God heard your prayers for me. Because He has healed me from fears left by the world. So thank you, I don't take that lightly. Thanks for letting me share, I hope I'm a better brother to you because of it.

Your Friend, Ryan