Skype - Family - Reconciliation - Techology - Creation

I just love this little guy! If you haven't been introduced then please allow me. It's my web-cam and - along with the wonders of "SKYPE" - it keeps me in amazingly close contact with our son, Andrew. Much closer than when, for example, he was living here in the house, attending high school, and practicing the highly specialized skill of teenage enigma.

So yesterday I'm sitting on the back porch working, when the incoming SKYPE call alert gets my attention. It's Andrew, of course, and we chat for 20 minutes about everything from the contents of his kitchen, the mountain view from his house,
his extensive travel plans, and the weekly middle-school Bible study he's been asked to lead.

He held his computer to the window to let me enjoy the view, he walked me around to show the layout of his villa, and he put several items, such as a pungent local cheese, up to the camera - thank goodness SKYPE doesn't have live odor technology!

So we're chatting, literally face to face, five thousand miles apart - closer than ever. Is it the technology? Is it simply the power of parent-child connectivity? Or is it God? The answer is - most definitely - yes! I'm beginning to understand more and more how thoroughly integrated life is.

Some religious orientations like to talk about the sacred and the secular as "either-or" propositions, or they describe this human condition as simply an "only visiting this planet" scenario (apologies to the late Larry Norman). But I don't think we were created, then placed here on Earth, as two separate acts; I'm thinking we were created to live here on this planet, and that our identity as created beings is bound deliberately with this particular time and place. That's why, in some sense, life beyond physical death is often described as both a continuation and some kind of a re-creation.

Consequently our relationships as family members, our place in creation and our responsibility to it, the technology that we - made in God's image - co-create, our ongoing relationship to our Creator... all this and more, is necessarily caught up in and subject to the urgency of redemption.

Technology is one way that God empowers us to move forward in terms of reconciling the world to God's purposes. We don't always use technology this way, but we have that opportunity if we only allow ourselves to interact with creation in the greater context of ongoing redemption, reconciliation, re-creation....

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. (2 Corinthians 5:18-20)