Slavery

OK, I admit it.

I’m a slave to technology.

I’m serious. I am a tech junkie and toys are my life. I can’t imagine how my pioneer ancestors made it across the plains without a GPS or even a DSL line. I think "roughing it" is using dial-up.

Need more evidence? I blog. The prosecution rests.

And I am convinced that in spite of the proliferation of such perniciousnesses as pornography, spam, bizop scams, viruses and forwarded email jokes, that computing technology was inspired by the Lord.

And the first time I discovered that was actually years ago, before I even got connected to the net. I had a frumpy little 80-88 (THAT dates me) running an old DOS version of PAF (the Church’s genealogy software). I went up to the Family History Center and I sat down in front of one of their terminals. I called up a family line (one off of my maternal Grandfather). I saw that there were numbers of generations of work done, so I slipped in my disc (a 5.25 floppy – that dates me again), and I set it up to drop names.

It asked me how many generations I wanted, and I selected the “as many as ya got” setting. It asked me if I wanted family group sheets, and I said, “Of course”. I hit the button and it started loading.

Well, after about 45 minutes, I had to go, and I had loaded well over 1500 names.

And that’s NOTHING now. But even way back then, I was convinced of the power of technology to further the Lord’s work.

And that’s to say nothing of the way the technology has allowed myself and many others to share our testimonies with the world through music. That’s a whole separate blog topic, though.

Maybe tomorrow.

Well, anyway, since I’ve been praying for humility, He’s been impacting my personal technology, too. And that was felt keenly last week in Priesthood meeting.

See, I’ve been carrying my scriptures, the Harold B Lee lesson manual and the Gospel Principles manual all in my little 8 MB handspring palm (WITH the Topical Guide and footnotes). Way cool. The teacher calls out a scripture to read or a passage from the manual and “beep-beep-boink” and I am so there. No more of this archaic “flip-flip-flap” for me. I am an Elder in tune with his times.

But it crashed last week, and I can’t get it to re-sync. So, I’ve got all this wealth of spiritual information, and I can’t access it.

So, (if you can believe this), I was forced to carry my paper scriptures! I had to flip pages like everyone else!

Oh the humiliation, the suffering! The anguish of my technological soul! A crisis of – dare I say it – BIBLICAL PROPORTIONS!

Would that I had died for thee, my palm!

*sigh*

I’ll be ok next week. Maybe I’ll get it to sync by then…

But in the meantime, I’m sooo more in tune with the suffering of my pioneer ancestors.


MRKH
Mark Hansen
http://markhansenmusic.com