On whom or what are YOU dependent?

Are you at the point where you have grown so dependent on technology—the speed of your personal computer, the response time of your cell phone, the capacity of your iPod digital music player or your DVR (digital video recorder), the shutter speed or storage card size of your digital camera, the detail of the graphics on your video gaming system, the availability of on-demand entertainment, etc., etc., etc.—that when these devices fail to operate as “normally” expected, you become frustrated or incapacitated to get your work accomplished?  MORE

I was talking with a colleague just last week, recalling my first experiences with personal computers (PCs). You might remember the early advances where we used 5.5 inch “floppy” disks in two separate disk drives of a PC—one drive had the software program you might be using (like a word processing program), and the other drive is where you stored your document files. There were no hard drives “built in” to a computer for storage. So if anything happened to those fragile floppy disks, you were in a world of hurt! I won’t even go into the transition from typewriters and the availability of hard copy only….my, how far things have come in a short period of time. I’ve seen the statistic that the technological advancements over just the past ten years have surpassed the technology developments of the entire span of prior history. In 2007, the amount of new technical information was said to have doubled every two years. Now—in 2010—it is said to be doubling every 72 hours! That’s mind-boggling!! We are truly a technologically-dependent society. And as new equipment and technology are developed, we will likely become dependent on these as well. So what about your spiritual life? Are we so dependent on God and our relationship with His Son, Jesus that we couldn’t imagine functioning in life without it? We wouldn’t dream of leaving home without our cell phones—can we say the same thing about leaving the house before we have had our personal devotion time with our Heavenly Father? Many of us unlikely go a day without surfing the World Wide Web for the latest information—how many of us, however, are willing to go a day without cracking the binding of our Bible for daily Scripture reading? And what about the number of hours we spend mindlessly watching television or video gaming—would we be willing to trade even a tenth of that time for solitude in prayer? I know that there are days when I cannot answer those questions affirmatively, but I am diligently working on becoming more “spiritually-dependent” than technologically-dependent. What about you? Won’t you join me as we get ready to start the season of Lent…let’s shift our dependence on technology to a dependence on the One who makes our freedom from sin possible—Jesus Christ!