Ties to Friends in High Places

This came in this morning.

How do you feel about forwards? You know, those ubiquitous things that come over the ether highway . Ties to friends we haven't seen in ages but certainly like to remember. Okay, yes, absolutely, they can be annoying, time consuming, impersonal, and irritating... or are they?

There are people who are able to resist every attempt to get them to open a forwarded message but most are finally brought to their knees one day by an enticing subject line and that's all it takes. Usually, we find a wry bit of humor written in the 1700s by Ben Franklin (who may have stolen it from the Bible), which was adapted by Mark Twain, and is now attributed to Jay Leno. Whatever, we laugh even if it's a groaner and think of at least one person who would get a kick out of it.

How many times have we pleaded with folks to not fill up our "in" boxes with forwards and then wondered how come we never hear from Aunt Matilda? Or worse yet, when Dad ceases and desists from constant jokes, you find one you know he'll love and simply send it along to him. (I've been guilty of that so many times I no longer ask folks not to send forwards.)

As The Geezerguy and I have traveled around for almost six years, we've been lucky enough to be friended (can you tell I'm now on Facebook?) by many people whose blogs we follow and who occasionally send a real email~one with words they've written themselves~ to us. Usually, however, we just get a funny, inspirational, or visual reminder of these brief encounters. Often we have to work to put a face to the name but so what? It's nice to know they wanted to remember us and have us remember them.

Jim and I are storytellers and so is our friend Father O. He tells stories but calls them homilies (a much friendlier term than sermons). Once in awhile, Jim and I will share a smile when he adapts an internet joke or forward to use in his Sunday morning lesson. Not because he does it, but sometimes because we've used the same one ourselves. Occasionally, we realize that we've even shared the same message although ours are more often set in the Old West,

while Father's reflect his African heritage or talk about "my friend".

Those who really hate forwards use the argument that if God wanted to send us a message he wouldn't put it on the Internet and tell us to pass it along to 7 people in 7 minutes in order to be blessed in 7 days. But my question is- why not? Not that many of us take the time to sit on a stormy beach without any food concessions to listen to a Man preach or to watch a guy pull boatloads of fish out of the water these days like Peter did.

Okay, maybe the 7 people in 7 minutes and 7 days is a bit much. But I think if Jesus were to return today he'd come back as a Computer Guru (pun intended because I didn't feel right calling my Lord a computer geek). He would recognize that this age has altogether too many technological "miracles" to let him be noticed for what was a big deal 2000 years ago.

Okay, maybe we don't have instant wine on the market but there's instant soup, instant coffee, and Kool Aid-just add water. My sister's new kidney last March, may have been a miracle in an earlier time too. So Jesus would be causing miracles we can't even imagine these days.

But I'll bet He'd use the Internet too. I think He'd be happy to have a way to tell us more of what He wanted to say than what was passed down by a few good inspired men writing the Gospels. His priests, bishops, cardinals and the Pope (apostles all) would quickly take His words and forward them to both his disciples (us) and those who hadn't heard the message yet. Perhaps there wouldn't be quite so much debate about what He meant if everyone got the same message with a click of the enter button.

And if we passed his forwards along to 7 people in 7 minutes who knows what blessings might occur in 7 days? After all, His Father managed to create an entire world in 7 days and he didn't even have a laptop! (Of course, He knew it was coming.)

See ya down the road,
Yarntangler