Data Type Error

I spent all day with a computer today. It's a database I've been working on for my newest place of employment. I cannot wait for it to be done because so many cool things will be possible when it is. So I chained myself to my desk and stared at query grids and code for nearly eight straight hours. For the second day in a row. When I got home I told my wife that I think I need to spend some time doing something else tomorrow because I think I'm losing my humanity. To deal with computers, one has to learn to think like them. And computers are very black and white, literal and particular creatures. Anal you might even say--though my mother would not approve if you did.

Needles to say, this style of thinking is not all that compatible when dealing with actual people instead of personified ones. If I were to tell my wife with a blank look on my face that she committed a "stack overflow error" by putting too much food on my plate and then refused to eat anything before she cooked the meal over again from scratch, I would probably be "shut down" until I installed a few "upgrades."

It occurred to me as I sat here tonight that many of us approach God in the same way. We know exactly what his specifications are, what he should be capable of, but we find ourselves unable to harness that power because we realize that we just aren't "god" people. Or maybe we were taught to do a few things with God back in the day and we don't really want or think we need any of those fancy new features he's got now. I've seen this kind of thing between people and their computers. There is a disconnect at a very basic level, an incompatibility of thought that stands between man and machine that is kind of sad when you stop to consider what could be accomplished if that gulf could be spanned.

Of course if you're already a christian, you've immediately thought of the problem of sin, and you're right. That gulf will never be jumped without the cross. But after salvation we need to continually remind ourselves that God is not a machine. That particular incompatibility doesn't have to exist been us and God. But it will as long as we insist on reducing our god to a list of concise doctrines and our relationship with him to a step by step process.

You will lose your humanity if you spend your life trying to understand who God is and how to use him. But you will find it again when you desire to know him as the person he is: complexities, ambiguities and all.

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