Thought for Today

Numbers 22:10 Balaam said to God, "King Balak son of Zippor of Moab, has sent me this message:

Haggai 1:13  Then Haggai, the messenger of the Lord, spoke to the people with the Lord's message, saying, I am with you, says the Lord.  

Mark 1:38 "Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do."  

Acts 2:41 So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added.

Yesterday I mentioned hurricane Beryl and the destruction and devastation it wrought on Texas. A friend commented on Facebook about that Thought. She mentioned that the greater Houston area ultimately had 2.7 million residents without power. Having lived that nightmare several times during our 70+ years in Houston, no power in the midst of summer with temperatures and relative humidities both in excess of 95+, I fully understand the suffering of so many.

I also received several notifications of Facebook friends who posted that they came through the hurricane unscathed. In addition to the comfort of this reaffirmation of God’s answering our prayers, I was also struck by how differently we communicate today.

In my youth and for much of my adult life, written letters were the primary method of communication. During and immediately following WWII, telephones were somewhat limited due to wire and cable being such valued military commodities. In my pre-school years, we always had a telephone, but we had a party-line, usually with 2 or 3 other families. You could get a telephone in almost any configuration you imagined, as long as your imagination was limited to black, rotary dial, corded desk sets. You did need to listen carefully when the phone rang, to see whether or not it was your ring.

During the entirety of my years living with my parents, I never saw my parents make a long-distance call. Almost the entire telephone network in the U.S.A. was controlled by one or another of the Bell companies. It was relatively expensive to make long-distance calls and required the assistance of an operator. Between the deregulation of the telephone industry and the advent of cellular phones, communication today is almost unimaginably different. Ten-digit dialing, smart phones with computational capabilities and immense memory capacity, the cloud (whatever and wherever that cloud is!) have all combined to radically change how we communicate today.

One of my favorite truisms is that we never live in the world in which we grew up. One of the most severe hurricanes I remember in Houston was Carla in 1961. Its landfall and path were very similar to Beryl’s. During that storm, our landline telephone was inoperative. My paternal grandmother lived just a few blocks from us. During the height of the storm, when the phones ceased working, my father became very concerned for his mother’s safety. Dad decided to walk over to her home . . . during that hurricane! Being a virtually non-destructible 18-year-old, I went along to ‘take care of’ Dad. We did make the round trip without incident. Would things go any differently today? That would, of course, depend on whether the cell towers blew over during the hurricane!

Today, we think nothing of making long-distance phone calls. We talk to our oldest granddaughter in Pulman, WA. regularly. We can use our cell phones or our computers and have face-to-face conversations. Our Sunday worship service is offered ‘live’ on Zoom each week and we have a regular Zoom congregation.

The Lord’s message is proclaimed via television or streaming, on computers or cell phones, in print and in person. The ease, convenience and speed available to us for sharing the gospel message greatly facilitate the spreading of Jesus’ message. There are few places anywhere on our planet unreachable via modern communication technology.

"’The medium is the message’ is a phrase coined by the Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan and the name of the first chapter in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964.” (Wikipedia) As a Christian, I know the gospel is the message; but, I certainly appreciate all of the mediums we now have for dissemination of that gospel message.

Stay safe, share the gospel any way you can, trust God,

Pastor Ray