time

"What did we do in the days before we had these mobile phones?"

I was chatting away in the street with a guy this afternoon. An older man.

His wife was chatting with someone else when the someone else's phone went off. The someone else's daughter, it transpired, was ill. The phone was a bit of a lifeline.

"Carrier pigeons aren't really quite the same," he went on.

And they're not, of course. Not that I've ever had one.

The mobile phone technology sort of speeds things up. Instant communication.

Which is handy, of course, when your child is taken ill (and you're not around).

But there's a downside to technology as well. And I don't just mean the mobile phones.

I mean all of our technology: e-mail (as opposed to letters), driving (as opposed to walking), flying across the Atlantic (as opposed to taking a boat).

Technology speeds life up. And for all its obvious benefits, there are two important downsides which I'm more and more aware of in our time.

First, it makes life highly stressful. Being able to do things more quickly (whether it's getting across the Atlantic or cooking your evening meal) doesn't give you more time: it actually gives you less. You're always keen to fit just that bit more into your diary and day.

Which is not a good way to live.

And second, it makes us often fairly superficial. There isn't time to think. There isn't really time or space to stop, to pause, to take the chance for any really serious reflection.

Writing a letter's a work of art. An e-mail's just a rapid splash of paint across the page.

The good things in life take time. And time is what technology removes.

So I haven't worn a watch for long enough. I'm trying to walk instead of drive a car. I'm trying to find the ways each day to recognise how good is God's good gift of time.

Sometimes God simply does that all himself for me.

There was a guy in here today to work on our computers. He needed them both, so here I was with no computer access for a good two hours or more.

It meant there was time just to meet and to talk. To work things through in more than just that rapid sort of superficial way which gets things done but doesn't have much depth.

Being out on the streets and in people's homes and walking from home to home is precisely the same. It gives the chance to talk. To stop and have time and be able to talk. And to get beyond the superficial pleasantries and down to things that matter in this brief but brilliant life.

That's the sort of day it's been today.