I recently returned from a two-week vacation, a motorcycle trip around Lake Superior. Much of the Lake Superior shoreline, especially the northern shore from Grand Marais, Minnesota to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, is wilderness and because it's wilderness, it is possible to spend entire days in places where there is neither cell phone service nor internet connection. This may be one of the last places within reasonable driving distance from Iowa where you can be truly disconnected.
 
            This is a good thing. A little disconnection every now and then is food for the soul.  One problem with being disconnected, however, is that while you are spending days in blissful peace and quiet, the rest of the world is still hooked up and madly sending you e-mail messages. When I got home, there must have been 200 of these messages in my in box.
 
            I don't have the strength of purpose to read 20 messages, much less 200. All this in box clutter had to go. The first to go were the fake Rolex messages, followed quickly by the newsletter and e-mag messages. The last to go were my own personal favorites, the "Reply All" messages. You know the type. Someone sends a message to 30 people announcing a meeting. For some reason, 27 of them hit the Reply All button to say "Thanks" or "I can't make it"; and one possibly important message becomes an in-box full of dreck.
 
            I have a problem with all this sorting of wheat from chaff. Whenever I engage in wholesale deletion, hitting the delete key takes on a life of its own. As I see the message counter begin to count down from the hundreds to the tens, a kind of madness comes over me and I start deleting more and more and faster and faster. In the end, some really important wheat winds up lost with the electronic chaff.
 
            I can't be unique in this regard. I suspect we all get so swamped with trivial, meaningless stuff in our in boxes that we end up disregarding important messages, messages that are simply lost against the cluttered background of what passes for communication. It all makes me nostalgic for another time, a time when junk mail, and not electronic SPAM, was all we had to worry about, a time when someone who wanted to send you an important communication sent in a registered letter and not in a packet of bits and bytes on a computer screen.
 
            It also makes me wonder if all this electronic overload doesn't carry over into our relationships with God. Do we get so many messages, do we get so carried away by the practice of deleting without really reading, that God's words get swept up and thrown out with all the clutter and the trash?
 
            When God speaks, do we treat it like SPAM or like a registered letter?
 
Tony Stoik
Associate Conference Minister for Western Iowa

 

 

Carol Barnes of Phoenix UCC in Ottumwa is sad to report that Rosie Frazier, the woman in Mississippi for whom the IA Conference built a house in 1997, died on Mother's Day of cancer. Rosie and her family took very good care of their home and faithfully paid monthly on the mortgage for 12 years. Rosie received title to the house the week before she died. Rosie lived long enough to raise the seven boys in her care. The youngest is now 18. Three of the boys graduated from high school, the first in Rosie's immediate family. One of these young men owns and operates a successful barber shop in Tunica. The Iowa Conference can be proud of our involvement with Rosie and her family. Their move from very, very sub-standard housing to a decent home changed their lives.

 

Executive director, Iowa Interfaith Power & Light
Full time, to lead the statewide effort to mobilize the religious community to become leaders in addressing climate change through education, assistance with carbon footprints reductions, and advocacy for sustainable policies at all levels of government. For more information visit www.iowaipl.org.  To apply, send resume and cover letter to Liz Johnson at treasurer@iowaipl.org