A “New” Form of Idolatry

God has just impressed upon me—in a most painful way, I might add—the fact that I am an idolater. No, it’s not my van. My wife claims that my minivan is a god to me but it isn’t. It’s a valued servant, nothing more. It was…my smart phone. It is…my computer. Actually, they’re the same thing.

I think it was Karl Barth who defined a god as “that to which a man clings for salvation when he perceives that all is lost”. My phone—my palmtop computer—was my alarm clock, my calendar, my confidant, my entertainer, my informant, my…the list goes on. I used that device for everything from finding my way around town to staying in touch with friends, family and coworkers. I relied on it for practically every detail of my daily life. That was the problem.

I say “it was my smart phone” because today my electronic god died. It took a lot of head scratching and soul searching to find out how this terrible thing happened but figure it out I did. I killed it. It was not responding to my fingertip commands—my prayers, as it were—and, poking it a bit too hard, I cracked the screen. When I tried to turn it back on, after having a medical procedure, all I got were a series of broken, multicolored lines. No pictures, no videos, no icons. My alarm clock, calendar, map, telephone and teletype is dead. To use my wife’s terminology, “it’s a paper weight”. Oh, fuck.

The phone didn’t know that it was dead. It kept on beeping, and ringing, and whistling. It kept on vibrating every time a call, a message, an email, or a Facebook post came in. The alarm kept going off on schedule but I couldn’t turn it off. I couldn’t snooze it. I couldn’t answer it or read its output because the interface—what enables it to talk to me and I to it—is broken. It’s kind of how my relationship with the Real God was before I was saved. I was on earth and He was in Heaven. I ached and I longed and I craved. He may have been aware of my aches, longings and cravings, but He never said so. I never told Him or asked whether He heard me. That’s because our interface was broken and we therefore had no relationship. Then, one day I asked Him to reveal Himself to me. I promised to always seek the truth and to always do what I knew to be right. Soon, He revealed Himself and His will. I haven’t exactly kept my word but He has always kept His. I have had a reliable interface with Him ever since.

It was only when my phone broke that I realized that I had been using it as a substitute for God. Whenever I wondered about something, I would ask my phone. If I was lost, I would ask my phone where I was and where I should go to get unlost. If I wanted to contact someone or help someone or ask someone for help, I would reach for my phone. All of these things I used to pray to God for. That all stopped when I got my smart phone.

At first, my phone was like my van: a loyal and reliable servant. I still took my marching orders from God and got up each day intent on doing His will. I used my phone but I didn’t rely on it. Gradually, I began to rely on my phone. I stopped making paper shopping lists and started making them on S Memo. I stopped using my computer and used my phone to surf the Internet. I stopped talking to my wife and started sending her text messages instead. She hated that. I stopped marking my wall calendar and started using my phone for planning and scheduling.

When my little household god died, my first thought was “can I preserve my text messages?”. If I can’t recover the data stored on the phone, I thought, I’m screwed. All of the conversations that I’ve had with so many other people, all of the statements and promises that I want to hold them to, are gone. No record. Phht! Swept away like a fart in the wind. I always preferred them to telephone conversations because, a day or two after they took place, a permanent record still remained. If someone said, “I didn’t say that; I said this,” I could point to the text on my phone and say, “No, you said this,”. Now, they can claim to have said whatever they want. I have no evidence upon which to convict them.

The good news is that I can get a new phone and I won’t have to pay full price for it. It was insured. The bad news is that the insurance cost $11 per month and the deductible is $150. That means my new phone—the replacement one, that is—will cost $264 + $150, in addition to the $100 that I originally paid for the first one. The full price was $600; the actual cost is $514. Not much of a savings after all. Even if I cancel the insurance after I get the new phone, it will wind up costing me $250 + $(11  5) = $305. Of course, if I do that, I’ll have to pay the whole $600 the next time I kill my phone.

I had planned to go out to dinner…a Porterhouse steak dinner…to reward myself for surviving my second colonoscopy. I had also planned to buy a new computer—maybe two computers—for Christmas. That way, Suzanne and I would each have his or her own computer for the various things we use computers for. I could keep the desktop unit for writing and such, and back up my data offsite. Not now. Now I have to spend the steak dinner money and the new computer money on a new smart phone instead.

This time, I’m going to do things differently. I’ll back up everything I do on the phone. I’ll be more gentle with the interface, and touch rather than tap the screen. Mainly, I’ll pray a lot more to the Real God and a bit less to the fake one. In other words, I’ll use my phone but I won’t rely on it.