Cell Phone Substitute

As my family sat around the living room today talking about cell phones a comment was made by one of my daughter's that caught my attention in the light of my last post. She said that cell phones are very useful when you are separated from someone in the mall and you can talk with them on the phone to find each other.

As I visualized the two people finding each other after dialogging back and forth and navigating until they could see each other, I thought how silly it would seem for them to stand there in front of each other but continue to talk into their phones to each other instead of putting their phones away and talking directly face to face. Then it hit me – the phone is something like a crutch for us until we can communicate face to face.

As I thought about this more throughout the day I also decided that maybe the phone analogy is a step beyond the crutches. Crutches are generally dispensed with and not used anymore after the healing has sufficiently taken effect. But phones are not tossed into the basement just because we have met the person we were talking to. We continue to use them appropriately as needed to stay in touch with the important people in our lives and others. However, phones are still not nearly as effective in conveying what we want to communicate with others as personal presence.

This takes the last post about crutches and writing a step up. In this current analogy, phones could be equated with writing in that writing is not dispensed with just because we have met the person we were writing to. It is not as good as face to face sharing, but we cannot always live face to face with everyone we need to communicate with. So we leave notes, emails and some even still write old-fashioned letters and put those funny little sticky's on them and entrust them to the postal service.

In my case where I am at right now in my experience, I find that if I want to more effectively express to someone what I want to say in a way that will more likely avoid misunderstandings, if I write it down thoughtfully ahead of time and use that while I am talking to them it makes me feel much safer. Of course it has all the draw-backs that I noted previously, but it has it's advantages as well.

The exercise of honest writing has been helping the other areas of expression in my life become a little bit more real and open. I have been noticing that I feel a little bit more capable during a conversation to remember who I am, dialog in real time about the conversation with God and try to listen openly and actively to the other person with a view of trying to see past the words into what their heart is trying to say. Even though I am still very much a novice at this it has been more and more rewarding as I feel I am making progress in connection more to people's hearts a bit. I believe this is the direction that I must continue to move if I am to experience and participate in the family that God is gluing together with the bonds of love.