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The Body Builder
by Major Terry Camsey –
If there is one thing I hate it’s the gratuitous, unsolicited rubbish that arrives in my e-mail. I get offers relating to beautiful girls in Russia, people in Japan wanting to send me mailing lists, endless pages of corny jokes from people (obviously retired) who have nothing better to do with their time, pages and pages of computer symbol “talk”…and slews of material that I cannot even interpret because it is written in foreign symbols.
I am learning not to waste my time reading them and I really appreciate the “delete” key. But it does annoy me that people feel they have a right to invade my privacy with such rubbish and that it costs me to recover and destroy the material.
That is not to say that I do not appreciate receiving e-mail from friends and family and it certainly was a lifesaving link with family here when we were stationed in the United Kingdom for three years.
You’d think that technology would make life a little easier, wouldn’t you. But, think about it…I, for one, have regular mail and e-mail, telephone calls and voice mail that’s in addition to face-to-face interaction and carrier-pigeons if I decided to use them to send messages. Here at THQ we also, now, have a bulletin board which–unless we read it daily–may leave us missing some vital information.
Then, of course, being the defensive paperwork experts that we are, many e-mails are translated into hard copy and filed against that “rainy day” when someone may call us to task for something we didn’t do. We may have a hard copy of the communication but they may not and, if it’s his/her word against mine, I’d just as soon have the hard copy readily available.
There are those who say keep it in the computer. Fine…until it crashes or is hit by some bug that eats data for fun!
No, communication is not getting easier. Faster, perhaps. More voluminous, certainly and–if it takes longer to listen to, respond and store all of those messages–that leaves less time for other, possibly more important things, don’t you think.
So where will it all end? I am intrigued by the fact that you can barely buy a textbook on any subject that doesn’t have almost as many footnote references as content. In fact, I think there is a future for textbooks with no content, only pages of footnotes. That would certainly totally eliminate the need for original thinking… which is the way things are going if no one will believe you have anything valuable to say unless someone else has said it already! (and I have a sneaking suspicion that what happens is that one person says something, someone else quotes him, then someone else does the same… finally, the first speaker writes a book and quotes those who have quoted him so that his thought is validated!
So what on earth am I getting at? Simply this…
That there is a danger in overcomplicating the message we have to deliver to those who do not know Jesus. Certainly there will be those who love to engage us in weighty theological arguments. But Jesus has said that if we lift him up…if we present him to the people, he will draw men to him.
Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so…
Now, how many computer geeks does it take to change a light bulb?