Technology - blessing or curse?

Well today it's a curse!

One of the big things I love about technology is that it helps me to juggle the many things of life in a manageable and controlled way, most of the the time. But when it goes pear-shaped, life suddenly develops the ability to make for a stomach churning roller-coaster ride.

And that's been my experience today for not since the time when I upgraded the operating system on my phone have I had so much stress from the things that usually keep me organised! The last time I managed to lose all of my historic, present and future diaries and although the system had cleverly made backups of the data - it stupidly hadn't told me that it had and so for a couple of days life was a real pain.

Now I have somehow developed a glitch that has seen appointments move across the diary by one day and so tonight has yesterday's entries and and so on! Of course, had I a time machine all would be well but as I don't I can only offer a prayer of thanks that it had only a couple of days had passed before it was discovered. What would have happened had I been on a manic week I shudder to think but as this week is set aside for prayer, planning and administration I'm in a better position that I would have been had it been a heavy funeral week or one of multiple meetings.

'Technology is a great servant but a poor master,' one of my colleagues used to say as systems drove us to do things to their timescales and not ours (we were in a server room at 02:00 at the time working on a backup system). The problem is that using paper is a great idea until you lose the paper of have to change the appointments. How many of us have scribbled out, written in and then scribbled out changed appointments and wished we could have something easily erasable like we find with the tablet technologies so many of us use?

The same scenario exists with us and God where we want Him to do all the hard work for us so that we can walk through the day with the minimum of effort and whilst God is indeed a servant He's also a sensitive and engaged master. He knows who we are and what we feel and guides, rather than demands or inflicts the things we need to do upon us. Unlike my mobile God has never had an upgrade crash - in fact I can only think of one which took us from Human 1.0 through to Human 2.0 through the application of the 'Jesus patch'.

Still feel sick at the thought of having missed appointment though :-p