So the iPad is on its way. Apple has pulled off another success launch of a tech goodie. Of course Steve Jobs and Apple's real success lies in their incredible ability to plant an inevitable process into the human mind. That process is exactly the time between when they publicly release their latest invention and the point at which after we have realized that life will not go on properly unless we have it that we go out and buy it. Unlike most products that hit the market, Apple has a curious and very powerful way of creating the certainty that we will end up having their stuff. It just makes sense somehow. It's going to happen and the only variable is the length of time between seeing their goodies for the first time and owning them. Take the iPhone. How long was the lag time between it's release and you or me owning one? Probably about the time it took the cell phone companies to figure out how to make it affordable by hooking you for another three year contract. Maybe a year or eighteen months? With Apple it's not a matter of CAN I justify the cost of this or that thing, it's a matter of what point I WILL buy it because it was always justified.
And I don't think it's just clever marketing. Although brilliant in how they time their launches, Apple delivers a good product that is fun to use. I am actually better at communicating in my job with my iphone than I was before with all the crappy cell phones that didn't last, were no fun, hard to text from and hard to hear, and were truly inferior. With Apple I am convinced that human life and evolution will now carry on past December 21, 2012.
So back to the Ipad. Why have one? It's not a phone and we already have our PC's and laptops. It's very simple. Reading. The beauty and pleasure of reading. That's it. At least for me and for now. I am sure once all my 15 month lag time of inevitability is completed I will have thirty three other sound justifications for having an Ipad, but for now it is the sheer power of print. I love to read and this will make it so much easier. Forget all the time it takes to track down books I want to read, ordering them from Chapters, stealing, begging, or borrowing from my friends libraries, or running from the library cops for late fees.... I can access the book I want, perhaps even out of print ones, the article I need, or any literary serving from the web world's buffet... and on demand. Apparently the Ipad will come out with a 10 hour battery too so no need to join the poor mass of sad souls huddling around an airport or hotel lobby electrical outlet looking like they need a World Vision sponsor. If a book was a window to the world then an Ipad will be a thousand windows.
Oh and that reminds me too. My other passion in addition to reading is our beautiful little Project Africa 2010. Sustainable development in a village in rural Uganda that we are beginning. Our team of Correctional staff go in May and will build relationships with our friends in Uganda to bring relief to poverty in a corner of the world that we found in need. It's a long term committment we are making to these beautiful people who help us perhaps even more than we help them. I want to ensure that every desk in the school we build eventually has a computer. No child should be left behind from the information age as a way out of poverty. Perhaps no hut in rural Africa should go without an iPad too! Imagine that! In any out of the way village in Africa you find a child with an iPad in his or her hands looking through that window by reading. Reading about the world he or she will step into as she steps out of the poverty that holds her back. Giving him access into a world of commerce that will open up to him because he has learned about it by reading. Maybe in the LuSamia language, maybe Luganda, English, maybe even Spanish. Reading. letters put together. grammar. punctuation. ideas. concepts. truth conveyed and a mind opened up to the world. Something so powerful we take for granted so much.
I remember being moved so much by the books I began to read when I was younger. The world came to me and opened up. When I read C.S. Lewis for the first time I felt like I had been washed by water from somewhere I've never been like heaven. I was 18 and stayed up all night because I could not put it down. It was his fictional book The Great Divorce. It was as though I could see the universe open up and I could look into what it really looked like and my mind has never forgotten. That is the power of reading. It makes the mind open up and find it's place in the world and it's the most powerful way we learn how we experience living on the planet and how we relate to what is real. For me it was fiction, poetry, the Bible, theology and they stretched my mind open to be able to see that the world was big and God was bigger. Then even the textbooks they made us read; psychology, anthropology, history, all of them opened the world to be explored. For other people it might be commerce, economics, Shakespeare, Spiderman, engine repair, or how to renovate a kitchen. Simple letters put together (26 in our language), but entire worlds open up. Reading is human development with no limits.
We learn things about life pretty much from only two places. Books and then life experience. Some people think that reading and learning from books is not useful and that it's life experiences that truly educate and teach us. That is only partly true. While it is true that life experience puts the needed practical reality to our head knowledge, the knowledge we get from books and reading is the way our life experiences make sense and connect us to something bigger than ourselves. Without reading adults go through lifes experiences and end up in a very small mental room where there is not enough air. One of the challenges of working in a Jail is to see what the negative environment can do to ordinary grown ups year after year if they have no outlet to the world that is so much larger than the four walls of the prison they work in. I see it all the time. Some slowly die and some harden in unjustified opinions. Some get cold, some get bitchy, some get very toxic, and some simply check out. With no windows opened up to the expanding universe and the world of joy, creativity, and satisfaction or even curiosity to learn, and yet are confronted daily by the same old same old worst of the human condition, the outlook gets grim. Others don't fall into this and you can see the difference. They read. They explore. They open their mind to knowledge and experiences that require risk.
In my world I also read blogs of other pastors who have something interesting to say. The beauty of the web is that there is something for everyone. From my field I don't like a lot of what is being written either in books or blogs.. by that I mean the religious or spiritual ones, and especially if they are current best sellers. No offence but its a pet peeve of mine. I have read enough literary masters to want to barf on a lot of what is printed today in the Christian market. Some things seem really worth being written. Many church leaders like reading about the ten ways to grow your church by purpose driven values. I do not and I never will. Shrinking your church through authenticity and transparent spirituality by pastors who can be real is more like the kind of book I would buy or download in the iPad. Or I will read David Hayward on www.nakedpastor.com and read someone who opens my mind because he is honest and very edgy.
Anyways, I better wrap up this entry before I go off on the Left Behind series. And you don't want to hear that. I might say something politically incorrect like that book series is a masterpiece on successful business ventures aimed at stupid American Evangelicals. Perfect case study for a class in Commerce or business 101.
Let me leave you with a sampling of a truly great modern writer Frederick Buechner (pronounced "BEEK-ner"). We all have the same basic components to open the minds of those who participate in that wonderful mystery called reading. 26 letters, some spaces between and some punctuation. That's it. Like Lewis, Buechner is a master.
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"If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in."
— Frederick Buechner (Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter's Dictionary)
"The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet."
— Frederick Buechner (Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC)
"Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It's the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too. "
— Frederick Buechner
"It’s less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart."
— Frederick Buechner (Godric: A Novel)
"Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving."
— Frederick Buechner
"I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition—that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are—even if we tell it only to ourselves—because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about."
— Frederick Buechner (Telling Secrets)
"The life i touch for good or ill will touch another life, and in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt."
— Frederick Buechner
"What's prayer? It's shooting shafts into the dark. What mark they strike, if any, who's to say? It's reaching for a hand you cannot touch. The silence is so fathomless that prayers like plummets vanish into the sea. You beg. You whimper. You load God down with empty praise. You tell him sins that he already knows full well. You seek to change his changeless will. Yet Godric prays the way he breathes, for else his heart would wither in his breast. prayer is the wind that fills his sail. Else drift with witless tides. And sometimes, by God's grace, a prayer is heard."
— Frederick Buechner (Godric: A Novel)
"The original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out all the other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather"
— Frederick Buechner (Telling Secrets)
"You never know what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you've never seen before. A pair of somebody's old shoes can do it. ... You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next." -Frederick Buechner (Beyond Words)
"Martin Luther said once, 'If I were God, I'd kick the world to pieces.' But Martin Luther wasn't God. God is God, and God has never kicked the world to pieces. He keeps re-entering the world. He keeps offering himself to the world by grace, keeps somehow blessing the world, making possible a kind of life which we all, in our deepest being, hunger for." From discussion with reporter Kim Lawton on Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly
