Again, on my principal’s advice, I bought my own IPod (well, actually, I bought two…), so when I retired, these handy gems went home with me.  To this day, they rest in two iPod players in the house, ready and willing to disgorge their musical bounty whenever I desire. Imagine my chagrin when it dawned on me that nobody, I mean, NOBODY uses these things anymore!! I’m not even certain my young grandsons have ever heard of an IPod. Mourning the loss of my much-loved new technology, I asked what in the world musicaholics do when they want to hear their favorites.  With much disdain, the answer came back, “They use their cell phones!”   Duh!

In my playbook, this means packing even more valuable stuff onto a device that I struggle daily to find! I will admit, being able to play our favorites via blue tooth in our new hybrid car is cool. And Honda has done a wonderful job easing the hook up process for oldies like me. But…you guessed it…I still miss my ipod!

But I digress. Fast forward, please, to the current decade.  Eleven years ago this fall, I had the latest technology installed  in my brain. A computer running part of my brain? That’s got to be one of the craziest things I’ve done in my life!  However, the results from that escapade have been amazing. And in many ways, I’ve been able to live peaceably with the Parkinson’s invasion.  That is until the last few months.  Eleven years is a long, LONG time in the world of technology!  My heart nearly stopped when a doctor came into the examination room and exclaimed that she was going to have to go find an “old” computer in order to treat me! And she had forgotten how to hook the device in…….  Apparently, I am one of only two patients in a very large movement disorders community who still uses the old stuff!! Disquieting, to say the least!

For me, though, the ultimate future shock came this past weekend as I prepared to help lead worship for our church’s Pentecost celebration. Mind you, Ed and I have both been in ministry for more than 45 years, and

we have an entire shelf filled with different Biblical translations. So, when I asked our pastor which version she would like me use as I read the scripture, her answer blew us away…we have neither of the two newer translations she suggested! So, we began a frantic trek to county book stores, searching for copies…to No avail! HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?! God’s word is complete, isn’t it? Aren’t those translations we used during our career good enough? I didn’t realize I was out of date in this arena too! Have societal changes made a difference in how we understand the Bible? Is technology helping us dig deeper into the ancient past??… Finally, in desperation, we called our pastor, and were quickly introduced to Biblegateway.com.  I now have a printed copy of the readings, in a font large enough for these septuagenarian eyes to read!!! Whew!

So I ask you. I ask all who read this (I know you are out there with your own version of my story): Should we try to keep up? Do we bury our heads in the proverbial sand, or do we just save up stories with which to regale our friends and our grandkids?(Yes, I bypassed our children’s generation. They have no choice but to keep struggling!)

For myself, I shall continue to take pleasure in the slowness of the world around me:  It still takes an hour and a half to bake my Mom’s meat loaf.  It still takes hours to make the fruitcake recipe my Dad and I devised. Our grass still grows so slowly that I cannot detect its movement, even though ED thinks it grows too fast! It takes hours and hours to cut out all the pieces to make a quilt. Months to sew and finish said quilt. Nine months to make a baby. Months and months to build relationships. Good landscaping takes many seasons to make a garden. And, it  takes years for a tree to grow tall enough to make good shade! 

At the risk of putting erroneous interpretations into God’s ways, I suspect God intentionally left some aspects of creation that we cannot control, knowing that less is not necessarily more, faster is not necessarily better, bigger is not always better! Everybody, take a deep breath!