The Comma

My first experience with a computer was in high school, when my class went on a field trip from Long Beach to Los Angeles, to the University of Southern California.  I was quite impressed that a computer the size of a refrigerator could print out a calendar with an “picture” of Snoopy on top (the picture was made by strings of X’s ,O’s, lines, and dashes).  The guy who wrote the program made the miraculous calendar possible by stacking a bunch of key punched cards into a tray, where they were fed into the huge machine.  Consider how far today’s computer games are from Pong (which I first played when I was in seminary in the 70’s), then go backwards from Pong that same distance, and that is how primitive those computers were.  PC’s?  I couldn’t even imagine them.

I offer that memory in order to give some context to my experience on Tuesday, when I booted up my little desk top computer, logged on to the UCC website, and watched a live stream of the General Synod meeting in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  And while I was watching, our youth director Margaret appeared at the podium, introducing a resolution to the gathered delegates, explaining it, and recommending action.  She was wonderful!  I kept thinking, “If I didn’t know this person, this would be a person I would want to know.”  And by the way, I was aware that Margaret going to be on  because she had “texted” me about it- “Hey, hold me in ur prayers!!  Will be presenting my resolution in this next plenary sess.  U can watch online.  I’m last resolution to go up.”

Now I guess if you are reading this blog you have some internet sense.  And if you are a young whippersnapper who talks with friends regularly over the internet, you might even be wondering what I’m going on and on about.  But if you are from my generation, you might be as amazed as I am by all the ways we can connect these days.  Margaret, in Grand Rapids, and staying focused on what is happening there, can use her mobile phone to send a text message to my mobile phone.  Then I get to watch her, two thousand miles away, step into a leadership role in the national setting of our denomination.  As it happens!  Wow.

I know that some say that our new technology sometimes seems to be isolating us from each other.   We put on our ear buds and walk down the street in our own private mp3 world.  We sit in front of our computers and barely look up.  We send emails but don’t write many letters anymore.  I heard someone say about Twitter, we send a lot more messages but don’t say much.  The fear is that we will substitute virtual community for genuine connection.

But maybe that is a false dichotomy.  Maybe just like everything else, it is not the tools, but how we use the tools, that matters.  In the meantime, as we work that all out, I just wanted to say how marvelous it was to sit in my office in Seattle and watch Margaret do such a very good job.  Because no matter what the technology, watching the young whippersnappers step up is always a joy.