>go go gadget rev

>I love gadgets. I admit it. It is something I have to keep a tight rein on (I don’t own an iPod or iPhone or iPad, much as I might covet them). I love the ingenuity and creativity of the innovators who come up with new ways of doing things I didn’t know I needed to do. I love the look and design of them. I especially love it if it is a tactile gadget.


I suspect that this may be linked to my love of magic tricks. They are equally ingenious, creative, innovative and tactile. And I get the sense that sometimes when I perform them I am showing people things they did not know they needed to be shown!


It seems there’s something innate within us that loves something new. Were you like me at the start of a new school year loving the new clothes, new bag, new books, new equipment… even if some were handed down (equipment mainly, since the hander-down was my sister!)?


And at the same time we find safety and security in the old and familiar. Change is not something that we always embrace wholeheartedly, especially if we can’t see why it is happening. Why, for example, did they decide to upgrade the software on my phone and remove one of the functions I used most frequently without asking if I wanted it to go?


Followers of Jesus live with a creative tension between those two aspects of life. Jesus came to do a new thing, to bring in the Kingdom of God, to show us a new way of relating to God. The slapstick parables he told about patching up old clothes and not putting fermenting wine into hardened wineskins with no ‘give’ were designed to say exactly that:

He told them this parable: “No one tears a piece out of a new garment to patch an old one. If they do, they will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. And people do not pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the new wine will burst the skins; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. 
(Luke 5:36-38)

I must try to remember this when I find I either don’t like changes or want to change things which other people find remind them of God’s unchanging-ness. At the same time, I must remember that my security is in the Jesus who is unchanging and yet leads me to new things, not in the places, people, habits and traditions with which I am familiar.