One Step at a Time

You know how I know God works with us one step at a time?

Because sometimes I feel like a little boy.

I look around at all the things I’ve managed to acquire, the fact that I’m living out in Denver after interning in New York and Florida and think, “Not my life.  Who is this guy?”  Because I’m scared and alone and I don’t know how I’m going to do everything that comes next.  I couldn’t possibly have been the one that got me out to Denver, and into this real world of post college.

I mean who does this?  How does it all work out?

I remember how graduating high school always looked like an infinitely distant thing, like it was something only older people did and something that I knew one day I would do, but not for forever.

And then high school graduation went by and then college and now grad school.

And I’m not the amazing guy that has complete confidence and always knows what to do like the adults and guys I looked up to always did.

It’s just me.

Just me, and I don’t know….

I thought I was going to feel grown up.  I feel better dressed.  I need to shave more often, and my life is more expensive than it ever was before.

At least, it is more expensive now that I’m aware of the bills being paid.

And how do we do it?  I sometimes feel like a child in a body too old to be his, with responsibilities too big for little me to handle.

I often wonder what it would be like to go back in time and talk to myself my sophomore year of high school.

I’d tell myself that someday I’m going to meet somebody, tell myself that I’m going to travel all over and live in different states.

And I know how the “me” of my sophomore year of high school would react.

He would be terrified of traveling.  In fact, he’d even try to get out of applying for a program that he’d get into for free that would travel him all over Massachusetts and New York with people he had ever met before.  This same program would take him to Guatemala where he would encounter poverty in a way that he had never imagined before, and these experiences would convince him that it’s necessary and healthy to travel.  But the sophomore me in high school would try his best to talk his parents out of filing out this very application for this program, especially since it was almost past the due date anyway.

This sophomore version of me in high school would also be at a stage in his life where it’s almost impossible for him to imagine meeting someone who would be crazy about him, and beautiful.  It would seem to unobtainable, too far off in the future.  The current version of him would still struggle with this.

The sophomore would want to know what it would feel like to be grown up, and the older version would tell him it feels a lot like now.

“Except more responsibility. More freedom, yes, but more struggles too.”

The sixteen-year-old would shake his head in disbelief.

“There’s no way that I could ever do all of that,” he’d say.

The older, wiser version of me would tell him, “No, it’ll be amazing.  It’s not going to happen over night.  It’s going to happen one little step at a time.   You’re just going to be living your life and opportunities will come up, and you’ll take them, and eventually you’ll end up here.”

“So who tells you all of these things to encourage you in the future?” the sixteen year old presses.

“You will,” the older version replies.  “Someday, he’ll look back on this conversation and he’ll remember that it was the little steps that got him where he was.  He’ll remember that he was just living life, and certain opportunities presented themselves and he took them.  And then, despite how scary the future looks, he’ll be able to remember that God took him one little step at a time to where he is now, and he’ll be able to go to bed and sleep, even though the future looks so scary.”

“I’d like to meet that version of me someday,” the sophomore would reflect.

“Me too,” the older one will reply, “Me too.”

Technology – A Christian Response

Miscellaneous Modern Musings

My freshman year of college I had to buy a text book for my first youth ministry class and I was stunned that there even was such a thing as a text book for youth ministry!  I suffered through the first several pages until I came to a page where the writers described concerns about the Internet “being from the devil.”  I checked the publishing date and it was marked from the early eighties.  I shut the cover with disgust and never read another page of it.

Were they right for having concern?
Yes.
Did I overreact?
Probably.

But here’s what I don’t get:  Why don’t people get over the fact that almost every technological advancement usually has the ability to accomplish tremendous good or tremendous evil?

Can we get over it people?

I should say that I appreciate the Amish’s stance on technology in many ways.  They are very hesitant to adopt any new technology while most of us adopt the newest tech gadgets without much thought, but there has to be some sort of middle ground.

I’m so sick of reading blogs about twitter destroying the world, and magazine articles about blogs turning christians into self-absorbed monsters.  Such posts always amuse me because unless you are lamenting the down turn of humanity from atop a soap box in a public square, you are probably using a social media (say print or the internet) that was not available 600 years ago.  So at some point people said “Alright, this is ok to use,” and (surprise!) adopted the technology.

So here’s what I want to offer to all my fellow doomsdayers:

It’s easy to be critical.  But what we need are people willing to learn the new tools available to us and leverage them for God’s Kingdom.

Because, honestly, I don’t think that by not using technology we can make it disappear.  So let’s figure out how we can use it for good, and not just the dangers associated with it.

Should we object to using some piece of technology if it cannot be used to advance the Kingdom of God? Of course, but instead of writing entire articles on how bad everything is, let’s try to write articles about the positives and negatives of technology.

We can easily down-talk technology and critique the universe until the microchip processors electrical nervous system of this world fall apart, but we desperately need people who will leverage the things of this world to lift God higher so that by all possible means we might save some.