Input 4-1-10

Anderson, South Carolina

The films “Short Circuit” and “Short Circuit2” describe the playful antics of a highly intelligent robot that is addicted to input. Viewers are filled with laughter as they watch the urbane mechanical capers of this ferrous critter seeking input of all kinds. Alas, we space-age viewers are getting our lives filled with input that does not create happy gales of laughter; rather we are experiencing an angst of a type we have not seen before in human history. Throughout history people really did experience ignorance as bliss. Imagine if hapless villages in northern Europe had been given days and weeks of warning that their small peaceable worlds were about to be destroyed by marauding Goths or Vikings. Imagine if we knew, as Jesus did, the nature and timing of our deaths. The growing horror would be beyond comprehension. The element of surprise has the ability of deferring anxiety and dread, especially in the weak and powerless.

I recall being in the position years ago of having to tell a mother of the death of a child. I followed this happy mother in my car on the Interstate for about sixty miles, knowing that at the other end of our journey I was going to have to provide her a kind of input that would shatter her equanimity. It did. It was hideous to drive along behind her looking at the back of her head knowing that I was the one appointed to shatter her peace. Knowledge can be a horrible thing.

It is in the nature of my life to be on the Internet regularly as I now maintain my correspondence almost exclusively in this manner and manage my investments on-line. A dark side of the Internet is the ability to get more input than even our mechanized friend could have wanted. For the first time in human history we face a geo-political crisis with the ability to watch every development with a level of detail that would have been unthinkable five or ten years ago. The real time viewing of the destruction of the World Trade Centers made the horrors of the progressive structural collapse of those granite spires more than holographic. I have not been the same since. I was supposed to have been in those towers that fateful week. We were nearly real-time witnesses to the incineration of the Columbia as it fell from the heavens over Texas.

As is my usual practice, I logged on first thing today to check e-mail, hoping to find those touches from dear friends that thicken the veneer of civility just a bit in an ever more hostile world. Amidst birthday greetings I found many group forwards of crass jokes and a couple of spam from bankrupt airlines offering virtually free travel, desperate for any cash flow whatever. The airline industry is under siege of terrorism and much of it has filed for bankruptcy protection.

While connected to the planet I checked on financial markets in thirty countries, only to find that some world markets continue to experience progressive economic collapse, financial metaphors of what happened to the World Trade Center on that fateful Tuesday. I didn’t have the courage to check my own positions. On a daily basis I encounter people who are falling victim to the progressive failure of their life savings and retirements. A neighbor works the cash register at Wal-Mart and tells me she can see business slowing down. The owner of the local BP service station tells me he has seen a big drop off in his commercial accounts. More and more, bus boys and waiters in fast food establishments are silver-haired senior citizens. Japan has seen the complete loss of all the wealth generated in the past generation. Warren Buffet, the greatest investor of all time, once stated publicly that he believes derivatives trading will have the effect of being a weapon of economic mass destruction. It destroyed Orange County, the venerable Barings Bank, and nearly took out the US banking system and currency years ago. We had another bigger near miss in the melt-down of early 2009. One almost feels like he is dodging asteroids.

We live in an era when we have ability to see the six-pound hammer coming down in slow motion on our own personal financial lives and now we have the ability to see holographic images of the latest hi-tech hammers of the military. One is but three clicks away from viewing the wanton destruction of many of the world’s great cities and cultural treasures. The great Buddhas of Afghanistan are now but jpg files in my hard drive. This morning I saw a video clip of an actual blast perpetrated by a suicide bomber in Southern Russia which took out dozens of lives. How strange to be sitting in my basement sending out images of the most beautiful places to find myself receiving live images of annihilation.

For us mere mortals, input of this kind incinerates peace of mind and causes sleep to flee from us. We were never created to handle this kind of thing. We were created to live simple peaceable lives with those we love and care about, to simply enjoy a good meal and conversation within our communities. Less and less this is proving to be the daily reality for uncounted billions.

Quantum physicists have long since determined that time is not really as we think it to be: a straight linear flow. It can be circular, a point, a line, bi-directional, and all at the same time. We simply don’t have the sensory capacity to comprehend this non-Newtonian view of the universe. Fortunately, the One who created the universe does understand and comprehends perfectly the nature of not only the universe but also time/space and human behavior. Being outside the bounds of linear time He knew before we lived it out, that the history of humanity would be tortured and troubled. It is for this reason, that the Creator created the ultimate Input into His-story. It is the Input of the Christmas and Easter message that allows me to sleep at night while others celebrate dropping bombs and yet others wipe out economies with derivatives trading. It is that message that allows a mother to keep getting out of bed after the death of a child. It is that message that allows a dear friend with catastrophic disease to experience God’s grace as “being able to do the next thing.” It is that message that allows a mother to make some sort of sense of the world and to keep a faint flicker of hope alive when she finds out her boys are mentally handicapped and face radical brain surgery just to stay alive.

On that fateful Friday centuries ago the most profound Input of all time was nailed to a Roman cross and erased from the hard drive of humanity, or so the Romans and Jewish leaders thought. On Sunday morning a couple of women arose to find the Creator of it all had another plan – he had an un-erase program that gives little girls in new dresses a reason to celebrate the glory of Easter. The Input had been restored to our troubled world with a promise.

“They will hunger no longer, nor thirst anymore; nor will the sun beat down on them, nor any heat; for the Lamb in the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and will guide them to springs of the water of life; and God will wipe every tear from their eyes.”

Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”