Salvation by the grace of God

The Saving Grace of God… has it changed?

 

To the casual observer it would appear that our American way of life is in a period of adjustment. Perhaps the single most observable change is the way we communicate. Instead of speaking to each other via a hardwired telephone, a vast majority of people carry a cell phone, if they don’t they at least know someone who does.  This is becoming true in a global sense as well. As we travel around the world we see cell phone towers sticking up everywhere. If towers aren’t available, there’re the ever present communication satellites circling the globe. What this means, in part, is that there is hardly a place one may be that is beyond the reach of instant, wireless communication.

Together with the presence of the cellular phone, there is developing the wide spread expectation in our society that has people demanding there be an instant response to their inquiries, calls, and requests. An attendant notion is that of being required to be aware all the time, to be reachable anywhere, and to be prepared to give an instant response. If you don’t have your mobile phone turned on, or if it is not working, the caller trying to reach you will touch a few buttons or keys and move on to someone else. In fact, if you are out of touch, it seems that the world passes you by in short order. Being out of touch is the beginning of the end we think, and it is worse than having pimples on your face or getting the flu.

Text messaging has become almost as fast as prayer in the minds and lives of some. With satellites, cell phones, and rechargeable batteries, the average person can stay in touch with anyone, no matter when, where, or who they may be. All you need is their phone number! But there is a limit to our time; we only have 1440 minutes each day! So we are forced to make choices. This is where the dilemma takes over.

One of the attendant problems to this modern circumstance is that something has to be compromised in order to maintain the learning curve required to master the new technology. That something is the widespread skipping over the basics of life to plunge headlong into the new and different. As an example taken from the world of computing in our church office, I was excited to show an office helper how to set up a new process for graphic shading in a word processing document. After my repeated, excited exhortations to “get a load of this,”   she coyly responded that I had better learn how to read my email before I spent time trying to teach her how to make the Sunday service folder look pretty. Needless to say, that slowed me down a bit and got me to thinking.

Have we humans replaced learning about ourselves and about our Creator with adapting to and adopting the technologies that are new to us every day? Do we see technology as the do all, cure all, solve all to the problems we have in life? So it would seem at times, especially when we are in the middle of solving one of the more basic questions in life.  Here are a few questions to consider: Why is there so much fear, greed, and hatred in the world? How do I live at peace with myself and with God? Who is God? What is God? Is there a God? How do I relate to the concept of the Divine?

It seems that technology in all of its various forms, are simply the tools we may use to learn, understand, and apply the basics to our lives. At least this is our perspective. Using this blog, its audio and graphics capabilities, and our cell phones to facilitate further communications, I would like to consider some of the basic questions of life.

One of the questions I’d like to review is to answer the question: What is there about God that allows us to speak of His grace? What is the Grace of God? Has it changed? Are there new ideas about God, human spirituality and human interaction that are displacing the traditional world views? Stay tuned, or as it is said: subscribe to the feed for this blog to be notified of the continuation of the rest of the story. Keep in touch…