I Am So Excited About This Phone

Next to the iMac in our home office, there is a phone.

It is not a new phone.

It's a corded phone, one that once hung on the kitchen wall at the apartment I shared with my then-fiancee.  You can see the electronics and the circuit boards through the clear plastic, and all of the components are painted bright colors to create an artsyish effect.

It rings by ringing a bell.  No speaker, no tones, just an actual bell.  You can see the bell, painted orange, next to one of the circuit boards.  It's really, really loud, so we keep it switched off.  The phone lights up when a call comes in, flashing orange.

It has "memory space" for seven phone numbers, in that you can write down numbers on a brightly colored paper insert that slides into a plastic sleeve on the base.  We never did.

It's one of the first things my wife and I owned together, purchased back in the fall of 1991.  It's a cheap, cheap phone, a Kmart phone, a phone whose brand hasn't been in business for almost twenty years.  It's the kind of thing that you buy when you're paying the rent from your salary as a stock clerk in a little store.

There's a large crack bisecting the middle of the handset, from one of the many many times it's been dropped in the last twenty-plus years.  Still, it works.  It's been used so long that the numbers on the handset have been worn away.  Still, it works.

No-one noticed when this phone was released, when the first units came trundling off of some Hong Kong factory assembly line.  No-one waited in line to get it.  No-one wrote excited reviews to distribute to all of their friends.  They couldn't have.   This is a phone that predates general public access to the internet.  This is a phone that doesn't just predate smartphones.  It predates the cellular era, hailing from a time when the only mobile phones were huge brick-like things, owned only by a tiny fraction of the wealthy.

And still, it works.  When I use it, it conveys the voices of those who are on the other end just as well as it did half-a-generation ago.

I answer it, and I can talk to someone far away.

What doesn't it do?  It doesn't do anything else.

It does not try to distract me with apps, or impress me in in any way.  It does not make me feel scattered.  I feel no compulsion to look at it when I'm working or writing.  In fact, when I am not using it and do not need to use it, I forget about it, in the way that I can forget about breathing if I so choose.  It commands none of my attention.  It simply works when I need it to.

And that humble, unobtrusive simplicity feels, in this wild, distracted, scattered mess of an era, oh...what's the word?

A little...

Magical.

Twenty-First Century Pastoral Nightmares

As my time at my current congregation comes to a close in...what...ten days, I find that the transition is stirring my subconscious.   I'm having the Pastor Stress Dream.

You probably know the student stress dream, where you show up for class...but you haven't studied...and there's a test...and you're inexplicably dressed in a powdered British barrister's wig and a rhinestone studded halter top.

Or maybe that last one's just me.

I got over that years ago, as scholastic achievement ceased to be something that stressed me out.  When those dreams tried to surface, I'd just walk out of the class.  Or kick back and relax.  I knew I wasn't in school.  No problem, dude.

But worship?  I care about worship.  It matters.  And so my subconscious has glommed onto that as a way of manifesting my anxieties.

A night or so ago, I dreamt I was trying to lead worship in a new place.  The problem wasn't that I'd forgotten my sermon.  I can swing that and improvise.   I was wearing pants, which is always a plus.  Everyone wasn't a zombie.

It was that...in my dream...I couldn't get my iPhone to access the text I was supposed to read.

I stood there, clicking through...and it was always the wrong page.  And then it wouldn't scroll.  And then it shut down, and started up again, as I tried to talk and joke my way through the technical difficulty in front of a surprisingly patient congregation.

In. A. Dream.

I think, perhaps, that I need to spend less time with my little magic devil box.

The Enemy of Capitalism

With the arrival of the new iPhone, I find myself musing about whether or not I should get one. Yeah, it's got a better screen. And two cameras. And video chat, albeit only iPhone to iPhone and only on WiFi. It's pretty cool.

On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with my current iPhone. Which is also my third iPhone, after my first had a cybernetic aneurysm and my second picked a fight with the tile floor in my kitchen. I really and truly don't need anything other than the phone I have. I find myself thinking that way about a whole bunch of the objects I use.

My eight-year old Honda minivan, for example. It's got around 90,000 miles on the clock. It's got a few dings in it. But it still fits our family plus three. It still carries around a crazy amount of stuff. It's not as efficient as I'd like, but it's just as practical today as it was back in 2002 when it rolled off a factory line in Ohio. It was wonderfully designed and engineered, and I will, after cleaning and vacuuming it out, sometimes just marvel at what an amazing job folks did creating something so useful. It's also comfortable, riding smoother and quieter than the shiniest new Coupe DeVille that ever sat on a dealer's lot when I was a kid. I have no need for anything better.

Then there's my motorcycle. It's ten years old. It's got about 38,000 miles on it, which is a whole bunch for a sportbike. It is, shall we say, "cosmetically imperfect," at least as much so as the guy who rides it. It's reaching the point where it can be accurately described as a ratbike. In a brief fit of madness earlier this year, I thought I might be rid of it. But then I rode it again, on a beautiful Spring day. As air snarled through the intake, and the bike sprang forward, I realized that in every way, it meets my motorized two-wheeled transportation needs. I do not need to replace it. More importantly, I have no desire to replace it.

Our house? Much the same. I am content with it. While there are always things that need to be replaced, and things that can be improved upon, I find that with most of the things in my life, I am content with what I have so long as it works.

I fear that might make me dangerous. Lingering contentment, a pervasive sense of being at peace, and quiet, lasting happiness are the enemies of global capitalism.

iPhone Scripture

In the midst of the whirling chaos of cascading failures that was our worship this last Sunday, I found meself with a conundrum.

As the anthem faded and our Youth/Lay Pastor came up to read the first scripture, I was scrambling to get my MacBook to communicate correctly with the little Dell projector that had been brought in to replace the failed Sony projector. A few tweaks and twiddles were all that needed to happen, and when it was done, things were more or less copacetic, even if the images weren't quite working well. The Keynote was good to go.

With the first reading almost under way, I looked to my right for my old worn well-loved study Bible. It was at that point that I realized that my old worn well-loved study Bible had not accompanied me into the sanctuary. It had remained on my desk in my office as I spent the morning frantically trying to figure out why the church didn't have any heat.

Erk.

Not having memorized the passage for the day, I had...well...forty seconds to find a Bible. I looked around for another Bible, but the extra I'd left behind the lectern for emergencies had somehow wandered off. The bible to my left was in Korean. No dice there.

I now had thirty seven seconds. Do I make a dash for my office? No. Fleeing the sanctuary right before the sermon generally doesn't look..pastoral. Do I wander out into the pews in search of one of the pew bibles? Seemed too random, and most of the bibles were in folk's hands. Do I run over to one of the worshippers, wordlessly snatch their Bible, and scamper back to the lectern, cackling mischievously? Entertaining, but possibly counterproductive.

I fumbled in my pocket for my iPhone, popped it out, and hit Safari. Twenty seven seconds. I called up the bookmarked website of my church. Twenty two seconds. I tapped "Scriptures of the Week." I tapped the link to this week's readings. Fifteen seconds. As the microscopic text appeared on my touchscreen, I touchscrolled down, then did that little unpinchy thing to make the passage legible. All was copacetic, with seven seconds left to spare.

And thus I became one of those hipster pastors who read their Bible verses from an iPhone during worship.

A Sign of The App-Ocalypse

One of the more peculiar little apps that you can buy for your iPhone these days is something called "Pocket God." It's a tiny little gamelet, in which you have absolute control over the short, brutish lives of a few primitive villager types. By "absolute control," I mean you can kill them in a variety of ways that are intended to be entertaining.

You can pick them up and drop them into the sea, where they promptly drown. You can pick them up and hurl them into a volcano, where they promptly get all nice and crispy. You can smite them with lightning. You can shake your iPhone violently, causing an earthquake. You can tilt your iPhone to one side, which alters gravity and causes them to tumble off the island into the sea, where, once again, they promptly drown. It's like Tamagotchi for the Sith.

Beyond the fact that I'm apparently unable to find amusement in tormenting virtual beings, I can't quite figure out the appeal that has made this little bit of virtual sadism such a seller. Four hundred thousand downloads? Really? I've watched the gameplay, and even with the regular updates that permit new ways to torment your virtual victims, it just seems a bit tedious.

That your only choice is killing the denizens of your world in unusual ways seems...well...a bit limiting for a god. What if you're more benevolently oriented? Or if you tend to prefer games that allow for moral choices, or for actually being moral? Teaching them to swim would seem like a good start.

And where's the challenge? Destroying things is the easiest thing in the world. It's building things that's hard.