April 18th

Mentor, the family poodle, and I enjoy walking together. We go for about an hour, and enjoy together the benefits of exercise and fresh air. We walk, however with different purposes and styles. I am single minded in covering a certain amount of distance within a given time period. Mentor is out to smell the roses, other dogs, possible edible delights and pretty much anything with an interesting aroma. While I doggedly plow forward with carefully measured and timed pace, she lollops about (to proceed with a bounding or bobbing motion) from pillar to post, or at least as far as her leash will allow.
Given our different walking styles Mentor and I have to accommodate each other lest we end up in a tangle of limbs and leash by the side of the road. She is trained to stay on the leash side and never cross my path to get to  the other side. I give her free reign to go as far as the combined length of her leash and my arm will allow. I find the sidewalk more comfortable and stick to its hard surface as much as possible. Mentor, on the other hand, prefers walking on grass, so I always make sure that I hold her lead on the side that is covered by her preferred surface. With these slight adjustments to each others’ needs we are able to enjoy our times together without either of us missing any of the benefits and pleasures of a walk with a friend.
God does really amazing things and He does them perfectly. His plans and visions are universal in scope; His timeframe is eternity, His imagination limitless, His power limitless, His wisdom beyond measuring. To say that God is awesomely incredible doesn’t even begin to approach the full depth and breadth of the praise that He deserves. Yet this magnificently wondrous God accommodates we human beings so that we aren’t left feeling puny or inadequate. He concentrates His love so that it touches our hearts with just the right intensity. He limits His expectations so that we feel stretched but not pulled apart. He holds us in His hands so that we get the full benefit of a warm embrace rather than His full squeezing power. God knows what He can do, knows what we can take and meets us on our level, not His.
God’s understanding of our condition means that He not only ensures that we are challenged only within our limits to love and serve Him, He allows us to make mistakes and to get things wrong. As perfect as God is, He accommodates our imperfect use of the gifts and blessings that He provides for us. If that were the only accommodation God made for us it would be reason enough to celebrate. Yet there is more than this. There is one more way God makes room for us. God lets us sin. He doesn’t like it, mind you, but God lets us make mistakes. Not only does he let us sin, God forgives us when we recognize our mistakes ask to make things right with Him.
Jesus died to make forgiveness, the ultimate accommodation, possible. All that God asks for in return is that we accommodate Him a little. He just asks for us to make room for His laws, open our minds to His wisdom, and to lovingly accommodate folks the same way He accommodates us. At least that’s the way I see it.

April 11th

A servo is a motor that can follow orders. I don’t mean that it just turns on or off at will, I mean that it follows, to the best of its ability, exactly what the master does. OK, maybe that’s oversimplifying things a little bit, since servos can’t actually sing or dance or recite poetry, but within their limited scope of activity, which is moving or spinning, they are totally faithful to the wishes of the operator. For instance, a servo driving a robot’s elbow joint will move that joint as quickly and as far as the operator wants it to. If she needs just a little delicate lift to lift a soup spoon, the servo will provide a delicate lift. If she demands a quick flip of the elbow to toss a frisbee, then so be it, the robotic elbow will whip that frisbee as fast as it can.
Servos have one other property: they are scalable. In other words you can make a servo as big or as small as you need it to be. No matter what size it is, it will still follow your orders, only in direct proportion to the scale of the machine. Thus, if our robot operator is running a desktop version of herself, the little tiny servo in the elbow will lift the little tiny spoon in a miniature motion that exactly mimics its commander. On the other end of the scale, if the robot is the size of a house, the much larger servo will still command a delicate movement of a much bigger spoon.
You can look at servos in one of two ways. You can either see them as being under control of the operator, or as mimicking their operator. I like the second option. I like the thought of a servo mimicking its operator because it makes me think of our relationship with God. We are made be God in God’s own image. Thus we are earthly versions of spiritual perfection. I’m not sure about the scale, but I imagine we’re quite a bit smaller than the creator that assembled the entire universe from nothing. Yet despite being tiny human versions of the almighty perfect spiritual head of the universe, like a servo imitating it’s operator’s actions, we too try to copy what God does.
We love in an attempt to imitate the way God loves us. We care in an imitation of God’s care for us. We even get mad in an imitation of the way God sometimes gets mad at us. That, however, is not necessarily a good thing. Servos, you see, are prone to errors. They don’t always get things right. Sometimes their mimicry is less than perfect and they spill the tea. Sometimes they just go haywire and do completely the wrong thing.
That’s our lot in life, too. Our imitation of God isn’t always perfect, and sometimes we get it all wrong. With a servo, there is usually a reset function, a switch that sets it back on track. With humans, we have a forgiveness function that straightens us out whenever we need it. The only difference is that servos act as they do with no conscious choice. We, on the other hand, must choose to imitate God. It is up to us to use our God reflecting God created image to do what’s right, and frankly, I can’t see why anyone wouldn’t choose to do so. After all, why not make the best possible use of our amazing selves than to honour the one who made us by doing our best to be just like His loving, lovable self? At least that’s the way I see it.

April 4

It was one of those moments of absolute technical wizardry. I was watching TV upstairs; the kids had on their TV downstairs. The upstairs computer was downloading a file from the internet. Lois was surfing the web and getting E-mails on the computer downstairs. Suddenly I was overwhelmed with an amazing thought: all of this stuff, the video signal, the individual letters in each word of the email, the mysterious data that is involved with software of any kind, all of the information pouring onto the screen was racing through one single cable. It’s that cable that plugs into the back of a TV, some of your fancier radios, and into many computers nowadays.
Now, a TV signal sends about 250 lines of information 30 times a second. Those 250 lines correspond to one still picture on the screen. The signal includes the information to make the hero’s teeth white, the villain’s costume black, and to colour in all the rest of the scene. It also carries sound-effects, music and voices, as well as signals telling the TV what to do. That’s a lot of information, but there’s more. Every channel you pay for, and the ones you don’t, all go down the surface of that thin wire at the same time! There’s still more. All your email, in addition to all other email sent out by the cable provider, races down that same thin wire along with countless TV channels. And there’s still more! Everyone surfing the web courtesy of the same cable provider shares the cable pathway carrying all the other signals.
The numbers are staggering, but not impossible, since our appliances are very picky customers. They deal with this vast sea of information with tuners and addresses. Tuners react only to the station they are set to; all other information is invisible to them. Computers use sophisticated addressing schemes that are equally discriminate. They pick up only the information that is addressed to them, and have no contact with anything else.
Imagine then, God, at the other end of the spectrum: one receiver hearing and decoding all the information that comes to it. God knows us all. Not just in this moment, but everything that’s gone before, and everything that is yet to come. God knows it. God hears us, all six-billion, all at once. Not as a confused jumble of noise, put as plainly and clearly as the best high-definition TV screen or high quality LCD monitor. And God doesn’t listen impassively. Our prayers sink in and move God.  They are felt and dealt with, not at a corporate level, but according to each of our needs for that moment.
God deals with us as if we had the only heart-directed cable connection to Him. And it all happens as easily as we change channels, or change our minds. God does not tune us out, even if we are hurtful or offensive. God does not ignore us even if we try to hide. God does not lose interest because we don’t get in touch often enough. And God does it not as a cold, soulless machine, but as a loving parent, moved and touched by all of His children, caring for us even when we have no clue as to what’s really going on. No matter how tuned out we may be, God is always tuned into us, listening for even the slightest chance to be involved in our lives, even if it’s just to remind us of how much we are loved. At least that’s the way I see it.