interconnected

We live in an increasingly interconnected world, don’t we? Smart devices in homes talk to one another and to us and are becoming increasingly conversational – reminding me of the happy toaster in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I have even heard of fridges that can order food for you because their cameras inside tell them when you’re running out of something!

When it works well I find it really enjoyable and helpful.

But when it stops working properly it can become incredibly frustrating. We have a small smart hub in our house and occasionally she stops working properly. She won’t tell us what we have to do to fix the problem, she just stubbornly says that she can’t do what we’re asking. Ironically, while I was typing this bloggage I had a pop-up message saying that there was a connectivity issue and temporarily I had to stop typing while the program reconnected.

Perhaps the one connectivity issue that most of us experience is between computers and printers. Most of the time it’s fine. We send a document to the printer and, shortly afterwards, we hear the printer mumbling to itself and then start to feed paper through and generate the image or text. But then, seemingly out of the blue and with no apparent reason, the computer says something along the lines of not being able to find the printer. I try switching it off and on again (always best to try that first), I try sending the document to the printer again (several times), I try reconnecting to the printer, I try checking to see if the printer has enough ink, I try checking to see if the printer has got jammed. Nothing.

I have a laptop and you might even have seen me picking up the computer and showing it the printer – “It’s here! Look! The printer is here! You’ve found it!”

Nope.

Then, suddenly, without warning or explanation, the printer bursts into life. The computer has found the printer. And now the printer wants to print the multiple copies of the same document that you sent several times when it wasn’t working! There’s now a frantic attempt to stop it printing. I almost want the computer to lose the printer again!

Connectivity. It’s great when it works. And we come to rely on it. So when it stops working we get frustrated and struggle to cope.

Yes, this is a bloggage about prayer. But I don’t want to glibly say that God’s always connected and that we can always find God. Even though it’s true. The reason I don’t like the analogy is that it suggests that God is an appliance or device that we activate to get what we want or do something for us. I wonder if we fall into that approach sometimes, in which case it’s no wonder we get frustrated if our prayers don’t seem to produce any answer.

God isn’t an appliance, if you want to make any sort of metaphor out of this I would suggest that God is more like the software and hardware that runs the internet which connects us and enables us to function. But even that is a limited metaphor because the internet is a human construct.

The point I am coming to is that we’re not machines or electronic gadgets. The Bible describes humans as ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ (Psalm 139:14). In this case ‘fearfully’ means ‘creating a sense of awe and astonishment’. We are so much more astonishing than even the most complex and powerful computers and AI on the planet. So-called ‘smart devices’ are not smart. They run software that emulates intelligence. Even AI has been created by something and lacks genuine intelligence. It lacks empathy, a sense of humour, irony and so much more that we sentient beings can manage without even thinking about it.

And we’re not God. God is so much more than that. And prayer is what happens when one of the ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ creations engages with the Creator. And the Creator created out of love, and loves us unconditionally and without limit. Our understanding of who God is and who we are shapes how we pray. It’s relational, not a transaction. It’s a conversation not a click of a button.

Be blessed, be a blessing