Saturday, March 26, 2016
SERVING THE STICKS
God washed the disciples' feet and said “As you have seen me do, so should you do to one another.” This is not unusual, God has always acted in service to us. He gave us the run of his creation for our use and provision. He required little from us other than to take care of it and of each other. He overlooked many insulting and grievous transgressions we did as we were using it.
What do we do? We create too: we take sticks of wood and construct a house. Then we become concerned over the house - - it becomes our protection; it is our peace-giver; it is our thing of beauty; it is our future; it is our life-giver.
When this happens the house is not serving us, we are serving the house. We have come to worship the house. Through his provision and forbearance God serves us. We were never God, yet we turn ourselves to serve a pile of sticks which we sawed from God's trees.
Monday, March 21, 2016
EXTENDED BRAINS
It's fascinating to think about how human-devised devices can work as extensions of our brains. Our brain registers and interprets sound, which we receive through our sense organs, the ears. So the brain becomes extended through the ear. The ear itself can be extended when we listen to a phone call. The phone extends our ear to the person at the other end, perhaps miles away. All our senses can be extended as Norman Doidge explains Marshall McLuhan's insight to us:
" . . .the communications media both extend our range and implode into us. His [McLuhan's] first law of media is that all the media are extensions of aspects of man. Writing extends memory, when we use a paper and pen to record our thoughts; the car extends the foot, clothing the skin. Electronic media are extensions of our nervous systems: the telegraph, radio, and telephone extend the range of the human ear, the television camera extends the eye and sight, the computer extends the processing capacities of our central nervous system. He argued that the process of extending our nervous system also alters it."
The Brain that Changes Itself, Norman Doidge, MD, Penguin Books, copyright 2007.
" . . .the communications media both extend our range and implode into us. His [McLuhan's] first law of media is that all the media are extensions of aspects of man. Writing extends memory, when we use a paper and pen to record our thoughts; the car extends the foot, clothing the skin. Electronic media are extensions of our nervous systems: the telegraph, radio, and telephone extend the range of the human ear, the television camera extends the eye and sight, the computer extends the processing capacities of our central nervous system. He argued that the process of extending our nervous system also alters it."
The Brain that Changes Itself, Norman Doidge, MD, Penguin Books, copyright 2007.
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