The Lord called to the man and the woman, “Where are you?” – Genesis 3:9

Have you ever taken a half-dozen photographs, five of which are perfectly clear, only to discover that the image that tells the story best is the one where the camera decided to focus on some random object in the foreground?

That’s what happened yesterday lunchtime, when I looked up from my work in the kitchen to see Rebekah talking with our grandchildren, drawn into the small video-screen on my iPad as if it were simply a clear window, with David and Beks right there, caught in a fracture in space-time, where she could literally reach in and touch them both.

So I grabbed my phone, hands still covered in something sticky, and quickly framed up a series of photographs that might help me tell the story. I’ll share one of the others, but the heart of the story was captured most completely in the one image, slightly out of focus, presented above.

TECHNOLOGY: I’m not much of a technical person. I can be trained to use various devices, but I don’t have that intuitive ability to understand what’s actually happening between the bits and the bytes, the ones and the zeros, the keyboard and the code, the computer and The Cloud. But I do see story, I do see the very real connection between human beings, I do see the spiritual interface.

So I took the picture. And the picture tells me that there is no technology so powerful as the heart-level connection between human souls. Skype, Verizon, my iPad, and Apple’s OS X all served to facilitate something more real than any hardware or software.

Rebekah had come home for lunch. “I want to see my grandchildren,” she said. “I miss David and Beks.” David heard the Skype alert go off in Richmond before his mother did. Just a few seconds later they were “with” their grandmama Rebekah.

TUNED-IN? How finely tuned are your connections? With your spouse? your children? your parents? your friends? your God? This is what makes life real! Not the technology of connection, but the validity, and the depth, of the connection itself. Our relationships are more important than life itself.

When the cool evening breezes were blowing, the man and his wife heard the Lord God walking about in the garden. So they hid from the Lord God among the trees. Then the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” – Genesis 3:8-9

– DEREK