Future Shock or a Future Rock?

There is no question that the capacity of science and technology to impact our lives is significant and shocking in its scope. The strange thing is the way in which such enterprises often attempt to mimic or create technological realities that reflect adaptations of what should be generally a part of our life experience. For example, would you prefer to have the room you are sitting in suddenly change to reflect the words of the book you were reading in temperature, or light, or sound, or visual effect? Somehow I think I prefer to allow my mind to develop the imagery of written description without having the room “come alive.” Yet, that is a technology being discussed as available in homes of the future. Heaven forbid if we were reading an account of the Holocaust. If we read a Russian novel set in the frozen tundra, we might have “real” frostbite before we could finish the book if our home interior “cooled” to book described temperatures.

Some of our larger cities have enjoyed the views created by high-rise buildings. The strange fact is, as new buildings are built, those old views often become lost in the walled structures of neighboring high-rises that not only block out the normal sunlight and the dramatic views in the distance, but they create artificially hot climates in the summer and unusually windy environments in the winter simply by the architecture. Technology allows for many interesting changes, but with them comes the new concerns for indoor air pollution, higher rates of disease with denser populations crowded into ever smaller areas and serious questions regarding the use of basic resources like water necessary for growing population centers. Western cities in the U.S. are struggling to meet water resource needs in many states. Southern Florida is likewise being impacted with water supplies dwindling and water from N. Florida now being required in the south.

“Future technologies” indicate many fascinating capacities, yet will it be a picture of a forest that we will have to remind us of those things that once were or will it be a walk in the forest? Will it be the image of a long open beach or will it be a walk on the beach we experience? Will it be the image of an imagined reality chosen from a computer generated list of options, or will it be a thought allowed to mature and develop in our imaginations in ways that only the human mind can process and consider?

Our choices are many as we look to the future…but until we grapple with some of the basic issues once more, our technological novelties may prove little more than distractions in the face of many of the problems that remain. Unfortunately, from our affluent Western perspective, what we may find in our vast array of future capabilities is the continuing willingness of many people to reduce and restrain their own capacities to act, to respond, and to think in exchange for a new wave of narcissism and mind-numbing spectator “activity” that separates us from exposure to the most basic of human needs. Will we make any endeavor to resolve the matters of hunger and poverty and lack of education that create many of the circumstances which breed war and violence across the world? Will we be sensitive to the spiritual void in which many exist, hungering for the day when someone might share with them the message of God’s love and grace? Will we be watching our recipes projected across the walls of our kitchen, to the tune of music selected by satellite transmission from a digital bank of musical recordings, while waiting for the door to inform us which child is arriving home in time to sit down at their projection wall and have their school books read to them by the text recognition software scanner and their math problems completed by the auto-intuitive statistical analyzer and forwarded to their data correction advisor via light particles…maybe…or we may discover a world of disease, pain, suffering, and conflict continuing to self-destruct because of our failure to honor God and to love our neighbors. The stewardship of material things may bring to us opportunities, but unless we frame those capacities with the divine wisdom of our creator and the redemptive message of Christ Jesus our Lord, then we will continue to suffer the consequences of our own delusions of grandeur.

Jeremiah 2:19 pronounces the realities of experience to those who reject God in the midst of material distractions: “Your wickedness will punish you, and your apostasies will convict you. Know and see that it is evil and bitter for you to forsake the Lord your God; the fear of me is not in you, says the Lord God of hosts.”

The challenge for Christians in these days is to follow Christ in the midst of a world clamoring for us to follow everything else. Such a choice will mean the sacrifice of many lesser things in exchange for treasure in heaven. Being a part of the kingdom of Heaven is worth everything. It was worth Christ coming, his dying, and his rising again to make it possible for you. Will you acknowledge Him daily as “the Rock” of your salvation and future?