Losing Touch With Reality.

Pretty sure our world has lost its mind. The other day, I was out on a run while listening to my 'free' music app (the one with annoying advertisements that occur right in the middle of a steep grade). Well, anyway, I was listening to this ad. A lady was sharing her newest relationship find. She had found the 'right one' and she would be meeting this 'right one' more often. She mentioned all the glowing characteristics of this 'right one'. There was hushed admiration from the other lady and they giggled at the prospect of this new wonderful long term relationship.

The ad took a strange turn as the first lady mentioned her new love was.....a cell phone and phone plan. This is just one of a thousand twisted advertising strategies to sell us things we didn't know we needed. Their approach is to exchange real life valued relationships, (you know, those people to people things) with an unusual idea that relationships with deep attachments are to be expended on things like phones and plans.

Perhaps, I have missed something, or I am old-fashioned, or Jesus came back and I missed Him. The original design for humanity was built around the concept we would worship the Creator of all things. God is our heavenly Father and we seek to know God's character (or at least we should be seeking this). Our first intimate relationship should be with our God. God then designed male and female and brought them together to procreate and complete the image of God in each one. That idea has been replaced with notions that God doesn't exist or God is at best a man made myth.

I'm convinced God's design for personal relationships is a dinosaur moving toward extinction. We have replaced personal relations with people for attachments to things. It sounded weird to listen to the ad for the cell phone, but it certainly fits the narrative running rampant in our world of an M.I.A. God. The message I heard was how we should be smitten with phones, cars, games, and everything else that has the potential to pull us away from God's original design.

During the drought we experienced a while back, I tried to water our garden and occasionally hit our flowers out front of the house. A strange thing happened.

When everything around the garden was dying, water was growing unseen spores into amazing works of art. I have no idea what this is growing in our gardens but I know it was wonderfully created by God for a purpose.

"O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the

heavens. From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise because of your enemies, to

silence the foe and the avenger. When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and

the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you

care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and

honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet: all flocks and

herds, and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of

the seas. O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! (Psalm 8, NIV)

Won't you join me in honoring God's plan for humanity by turning back to interpersonal relationships. Let's celebrate the original design for humanity that included worship of God and bringing together a man and a woman to complete the image of God within each one. Pretty sure you can't accomplish these tasks with a cell phone.