That’s a picture of the new Headwaters facility for Laity Lodge Family Camp. More about that in a minute.

I stumbled onto this new app from Disney in the Apple store a few days ago, and tried my hand at it this afternoon. The idea is simple. It scans your iPhone’s photostream and groups media by date into stories using a simple two page, two column layout.

The app is much more interesting if you create a new story from scratch, pulling together photos yourself, adding text and captions and headlines. Five or ten minutes later and, voila!, you have something like a simple digital ebook.

The marketer in me is dying to tell promotional stories, but I started with something family oriented, pulling photos from the first year of the Hill Country FIRST LEGO League. I quickly discovered that I was limited to 20 photos and 2 videos (up to 1 minute each). After creating the story, I read that I can load as many pages of text as I like. My first effort took about 15 minutes from the time I downloaded the app to the time I shared it to Facebook. Take a peak:

Then I couldn’t resist telling the story of the first retreat at Headwaters, the new Laity Lodge Family Camp home. This one took me longer because I pulled images from the Laity Lodge Family Camp Flickr stream and Facebook page.

Story is so new that it still has some quirks here and there.

• Story is only available in the Apple store. Sorry Android users.
• Story is only available as an iPhone app. It has some issues running on the iPad.
• You can only share via email and Facebook right now.
• You can’t save a Story in progress, so be careful!

Frankly, I don’t mind a few quirks when I’m getting the thing for free. It is basically one big ad for Disney. They say they believe in story so much they have built an app to help me tell my story. I can support that!

Here is the official promotional video, which reveals I’m somewhat outside their expected “Nana” demographic. Not that it matters to me.

What if someone told you they knew the secret to a better life? What if they shared this secret with you? They promised you would be able to concentrate better, enjoy life more, increase productivity at work, decrease stress at work and at home, and have a better sense of self-esteem.

It sounds too good to be true.

But researchers at Lancaster University reported these exact results from its Research Centre for Organizational Health and Well-being. In 2010, the university partnered with the Global Corporate Challenge to “study the impact that increasing daily physical activity has on the physical and mental health and wellbeing of employees across the world.”

Christian K. Roberts and R. James Barnard from UCLA had reached similar conclusions in a 2005 study. They write, “There is a solution to this epidemic of metabolic disease that is inundating today’s societies worldwide: exercise and diet.”

That’s the secret to a better life. More exercise and healthier eating.

It’s not a secret really, but it’s an idea that still eludes too many Christians in America. Consider the Northwestern University study from 2011 that found “young adults who attend church or a bible study once a week are 50% more likely to be obese.”

If that last statistic alarms you, click over to The High Calling to read the rest of my article there today: The Secret to Better Work and Life Is Not Rocket Science.

[Image by Jonathan Woodroof. Used with permission. Sourced via Flickr.]

Photo by Timothy Vogel

Last night was the Fiesta River Parade in San Antonio. My wife Amy and I stood over the river watching the boats go by, the music from each float piling up on top of itself. Reggae mixed with Tejano mixed with Country and Blues and Rock and Jazz.

Just as the parade started, Amy asked a friend to take our picture. Our friend snapped two quick shots, and Amy chose one to upload to Facebook, checking into our location. We talked a moment about what to say in the caption that would sound like gloating. “Ooooh, look at us, we’re at the parade living exciting lives and you’re not!”

We were with a group of friends, so maybe posting to Facebook took us out of the moment a bit. But I don’t know. A friend took the photo. We shared it in a minute or so. In fact, it took us longer to leave our friends and grab a bite to eat. And in the posting of the photo, she and I were still together, talking about which one to choose and what to say.

Then something interesting happened. My wife’s phone buzzed. She had it out as a camera, so we glanced down and saw that an old friend of ours had commented on the photo. A quick swipe on the screen took us to the comment. It was her childhood mentor, the woman who took her to see dozens and dozens of shows at the Majestic Theater. She asked where we were, so we posted the cross streets. My wife’s childhood mentor was just two blocks away.

We didn’t go see her, but the technology brought her into our moment, into our space. And we told the story of her generosity and goodness to the friends we were with.

Then my wife’s phone buzzed again with another notification from Facebook. Another quick swipe took us to a message from another friend. Did it take us out of the moment? Did we remove ourselves from that place at the side of the parade with our friends when we glanced down and became part of a virtual crowd much larger than the small crowd of friends around us? I don’t know.

This second message was from one of my former students. I taught her in 2001-2003. Teachers aren’t supposed to have favorites, but she was a favorite. I still think of her as a good kid, even though she must be nearing thirty. She said, “Saw you guys are here! Our band is on float 46!”

Suddenly, our parade watching had a new purpose, and we had the opportunity to talk about education with a friend of ours there who is a teacher.

What did it mean to be present at the parade last night? Was it my arm around Amy’s waist as we watched the floats? Was it the small talk we made with our friends? Was it the good food we ate? Was it the Alamo Golden Ale that I drank, brewed just a few blocks from downtown San Antonio? Was it the anonymous crowd lining the river and the bridges and the balconies all determined to celebrate life together?

Because I recognized two faces in that anonymous crowd through technology, were we in the same place with my wife’s former mentor and my former student? Were we present together when I waved at my former student like an idiot and she nodded her head at me and smiled without missing a beat in her performance? Were we in the same place for a moment as she floated by, separated from us by the water and the noise, but still able to connect, still able to make eye contact before she disappeared under the bridge?

What does it mean to be present? My friend Byron Borger recommended a good book to help me think about this: Spaces for the Sacred by Philip Sheldrake. Sheldrake writes, “Place is space that has the capacity to be remembered and to evoke what is most precious.” This used to mean exclusively local, physical places like a home or a community. A church building was important because it provided space for a community to form and interact. A home provided respite from the noise of the crowd outside, a safe place where you could wear your robe all morning on Saturday and forget to shave.

In the Old Testament, sometimes people would name a space to remember why it was significant. When a space has a name, it becomes a place. The Hebrew word is maquwm. Jacob wrestled with God in the desert and called the place Peniel, which means “facing God.”

Places don’t need a name before they can exist, though. In the Creation story, God creates a place for all of the water to gather under the sky. God calls it a place before it has a name. Then God names it “the sea,” and it is good.

One of my favorite places in the Bible has no name at all. It is described as “the far side the wilderness.” When Moses led his sheep there one day, God spoke to him through a burning bush.

“Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”

Then something interesting happens. Moses doesn’t ask where he is. He asks who he is with. It is a good question. Instead of learning the name of another holy place, Moses learns the name of a holy God.

God says, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ ”

At Laity Renewal where I work, we have often talked about our theology of place. Often, these discussions centered on the Frio Canyon, the place where many of our programs happen. We asked what it looks like to be good stewards of that place. Being a good steward means that Mr. Butt builds a large arts complex in the woods, but you can’t see it until you walk to it. It means that we keep the water clean. It means that we monitor the health of the animals. It means that our trails are still rugged enough that some hikers get “lost” and remember briefly what it is like on the far side of the wilderness.

As more of our programs develop a digital media component, our conversations about the theology of place have shifted. Lately, we have been trying to explain what we mean when we talk about the “Canyon Experience.” The experience in the Frio Canyon is partially about the place itself because the place is so beautiful. We don’t want to idolize our own place, though. The world is filled with beautiful places, holy places. God is not only in burning bushes and retreat centers and youth camps.

As Howard Butt says, “You are in a holy place, all day, every day, if you will only realize it… All around us there are burning bushes.” Years later, Mr. Butt helped us express our mission in a new core purpose: “We create opportunities for people to encounter God for the transformation of daily life, work, and our world.”

In a sense, this is what all Christians do. When we work and build and interact, we aren’t just creating places, we are creating opportunities. Everything we do as Christians should point to God. We don’t promise an encounter with God. We don’t force the encounter by wearing Jesus on our sleeves or bringing the grace of Jesus to every conversation.

Instead, we point to the far side of the wilderness where we have seen God, and we tell people.

“Go there.”

We know God is there.

In some ways, it is increasingly difficult to find the far side of the wilderness. The crowd is everywhere, because I carry it in my pocket. Civilization is everywhere in my technology and my connections, and all of it tames the wilderness until there is no mystery left.

In some ways, the wilderness is everywhere because I carry it in my pocket. It is an untamed crowd, and it is a glorious mystery.

Somewhere on the far side, God is always waiting for us. And he tells us the same thing, “I AM has sent me to you.”

This is what you are to say to the people you meet.

Everyone has a favorite Uncle. I love all my uncles and extended relatives, but I had a special relationship with Uncle Bill who lived his life in Galveston, Texas, as a pharmacists and beach walker, as a lover of life and politics and public radio and good wine and mixed nuts and good books and simple living.

For the past 18 years, my wife and I have spent several days each year with Uncle Bill and his wife Merri. Sometimes, if times were hard, our visits were less frequent. Sometimes we saw them more than once.

Always, our visits there helped us see the beauty and hope of the world with fresh eyes. Uncle Bill was the most gracious and optimistic charmer I have ever known. Apparently, even during his week of hospice when he had lost the ability to speak, he was charming folks with his expressive face and warm eyes.

I have written many poems for Bill and Merri over the years, and even shared a few. Here is one that Bill himself liked. I imagine today he is sailing some celestial Tall Ship and sharing his hope for the universe with the new folks he is meeting. And his hope surely includes poems like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass or Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. These were sacred texts to him.

I wish you the best sailing across the best seas to the best beaches, my friend.

Sunday Morning at Donut Palace
for “Uncle” Bill Edwards

The old men believe in nothing
but humanity and an empire
of experience. They love the teens
selling donuts in summer, and coffee,
frying pastries earlier than English
ever was, finding cheap freedom
in time at the register
turning to cash. Honest to God,
they learn the truth of green linen
from patriarchs long dead, framed and stained
by sweaty hands from hundreds who
handed them out, passed them over,
sounded the old bell, Ka-Ching! Enjoy
your coffee, sir. Have a nice day.
What’s not to love? Kids work hard
and make bread too sweet to be holy
sacraments or exodus memories.
God floods the world, and he doesn’t
like sprinkles or chocolate or maple,
even plain glaze is too glazed to be plain.
On the floor you can eat bland manna,
back where the manager forgot to sweep,
miracle crumbs and dust by our feet.
The old men laugh and don’t believe it,
not for one second. Life is good,
but life ends and nothing waits
in the dirt but more earth.

Old dogs don’t need new tricks.

Last year for Lent, I wrote a poem every day. For me, Lent is a time of quiet. During Lent, I invite God to reach out again. And I quiet myself enough (or try to) so that if God reaches out, I’ll be able to recognize it.

When C. S. Lewis wrote about the four types of love, he included the love of a man for his dog. Dog’s are man’s best friend, after all. My dog is 16-years-old now. This mean she chases deer around our backyard like an arthritic hippopotamus.

When I struggle with love, either love for God or for others, sometimes it is helpful to go back to my dog. This old, fat, black chunk of fluff can teach me more about love than any sermon if I sit with her and quiet myself enough to hear what she has to say.

We Hold These Truths

for Amy, who loves me and my dog

Every dog needs a job,
just like everyone does.
Every job needs someone,
just like every dog does.
Every woman loves her dog,
just like every man should.
Every man can be a job
for everyone who loves him.
Every dog needs to run
just like everyone does.
Unhook the lease.
Fire the gun.
Chase me down.
This list is done.

Yesterday my wife’s grandfather died. We called him Great Papa. He was a good man. One of the greatest generation. A visionary. A man of God. Respectful. Generous. Wise. Warm. Charming. My wife and I named our son after him.

This morning, I found a poem that I think belongs to Great Papa because I know he is singing somewhere today.

Resound the Words

for Robert Rouse

In truth, all Abels do grow old.
We slump at lunch in our chairs.
We stop wearing ties because stiff
knuckles can’t tie double windsors.
Everyone pretends not to notice
our new casual dress. The sweats
and t-shirts are easier for tired minds
to pull over tired limbs. But the kingdom
of heaven is a six-year-old boy
pawing the pew on a Sunday
while the blue-robed choir sings
Haydn in a vision of unity and uniforms:
“The night that is gone to following
night.” Like the tall symmetrical pipes
of the organ behind them, each plays
his part, her part so all the lands resound
the words. These are not small things.
Next to Great Papa, his great grandson plays
along, fingers handing providence down
to Lego minifigs, puppeteering their
sanctuary dance from Bible to hymnal
to Papa’s thigh and belly and chest.
Watch out for lava! Watch out
for mountain-sized monsters! Papa is
one apparently, Eiger’s infamous north
face that killed the young Germans
searching for hope in their ropes
against rock and ice and snow.
Their ears, like every Abel, often deaf
to organ chords inviting us to drop
our games of providence and sing.

and just in case you’ve never heard the Haydn song…

Eiger North Face by Henri Saarikoski, used under a creative commons license.

From the front page of Vaillant’s 1948 ed. of “Manuel du vieux slave.” Photo by Quinn Dombrowski.

Have you explored the future lately? Do you know about the 3D printers that could use moondust to print a base for astronauts? Do you know about exoskeletons or the army of digital ants that are going to protect the powergrid? Do you know about the library of humanity? Or smart blood? Or ion drives?

I love the future because it promises progress. When I wake up in the morning and think about the crappy state of the world, I could use some progress. Everyone could. All of us have a nagging sense that the world should be better than it is.

Technology promises to make it better.

In fact, too often technology takes faith to the mat and says…

My Mobile Phone Can Beat Your Magic Kingdom

A view of The Swarm roller coaster in Britain which races through a church destroyed during an apocalyptic alien invasion.

Once upon a time, the church promised to make the world better. I wonder when we stopped making that promise? I wonder when Christians gave up on the world and turned their faith into an elaborate ticketing system to a theme park in the sky?

Our gospel is a transaction. Do this. Say this. Kneel like this. Welcome to the club.

The church became an institution of community for people looking for community. This is a subtle evil. It seems good because community is good. Those of us who grew up in happy churches experienced this goodness first hand.

I went to church three times each week—Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night. When I became a teenager, I added even more church. Monday night life groups with pizza bites and popcorn prayers at the house with the pool. Friday night lock-ins and spring break ski trips and wilderness treks and summer vacationary trips to poor countries.

None of those things are bad. Community is a good thing, and church provided a way for my family to connect into a community as we moved around the country from air force base to air force base.

But God didn’t create the church so people would have an opportunity to engage in community. He also didn’t create the church just to preserve the Biblical text. The body of Christ is not a machine…

The Body of Christ Is Not a Cyborg

Cyborg Jesus

That is the mistake we fell into years ago. Before the Gutenberg Press, the church acted like a machine for making books. I don’t know the details of how it worked, but I imagine tribes of monks working together in rows, transcribing and illuminating and preserving the written stories in a medieval assembly line of parchment and vellum and inkwells and gold leaf. Other leaders in the church delivered the text orally to illiterate people on Sunday mornings. The used creeds to help people remember. They made icons to help people remember. The church was a memory machine, a knowledge machine.

Because so much of the church activity was about preserving knowledge, at some point, the church began to think of itself as the guardian of knowledge.

Today, we face another technology as disruptive as the Gutenberg Press. I’m hardly the first person to point this out, but not enough people are thinking about what this means for the church. Mobile phones and the pocket internet and the social web mean more to the church than whether we ought to tweet during service or not. Churches are experimenting with how to use this new technology in ways that are good. Liquid Church has online life groups. (I am visiting one next week). Many churches have online campuses and Facebook communities and hashtags. Lifechurch.tv invented Youversion. These are good things, but…

We Haven’t Admitted the Truth

Preparations to burn the body of William Tyndale. From John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.

The church is no longer the guardian of healthy, meaningful community.

People can find meaningful communities through Facebook and Twitter and Google+ and Pinterest. Don’t misunderstand. I’m not suggesting that we are replacing physical communities with virtual ones. The research is clear. Community tools help people connect more deeply with their local, physical community. This is good news for people looking for community.

But it is bad news for the church. For too long, we have defined ourselves as a community building machine, and now we are being replaced by technology.

The fallout is going to be messy.

Here’s the pitch: Five professional groups come together, using their work to create a magnificent robot golem. The Golem (an old Jewish legend) is a wonderful, living creature built to defend the town of Prague from invading armies, like a cross between Frankenstein’s monster and the Iron Giant. “It was created to serve,” say gamemakers at Moonbot, ”but it turns against its master in order to find its own soul…” In a new game being developed by Moonbot, players will assume the role of the Golem, on a quest to find its soul and gain self-control. Moonbot says, “Despite your incredible potential for destruction, mastering the Golem will be about mastering control of yourself so that you can protect and not destroy the great city that created you.”

This immediately raises a few questions. First, I marvel at the continued evolution of gaming. Good games are interactive parables that teach us how to be more fully human. A beautiful game can be filled with common grace more effective than any twisted Christian message from games like these which place “a tiny Christian hat” on “your typical first-person slaughter fest.”

The Golem reminds us that good work communicates a good message. When we put our souls into our work, it has a life of its own. Even better, the Golem itself becomes a commentary on this truth about our work. The guild workers inside the game have constructed something amazing, but they did not give the project any soul. As a result, it is runs out of control trying to find its own soul.

I can’t help but think about our society’s current struggle with technology. I’m as much an avid user of technology as anyone, but I sometimes feel that excessive use of technology is changing how I think, how I function, and how I relate to the world around me. There are times, when I feel like The Golem, a person crafted by various companies in the world to do their bidding. The Guild of Facebook gives me personality and a desire for constant affirmation. The Guild of Apple gives me the world in my pocket so I have instant access to random distractions. The Guild of YouTube gives me a universe of entertaining stories so I can watch banal cat videos. The Guild of Amazon teaches me to spend money with abstract empires that operate far away from the stores in my hometown. The Guild of Google is working to replace my brain.

Of course, all of these things are also good. My wife and our friends have deeper relationships, enriched by Facebook banter. My iPhone lets me play a wonderful chess-like, turn-based game with my brother-in-law every day, even though he lives in another city. YouTube lets me experience the spiders of Santo Antonio de Plantina.

In his book, Holding on to Reality, Albert Borgmann distrusts technology as a source of information precisely because it takes us out of the world immediately around us. (Ironically, I’m reading his book on an Apple device after downloading it from Amazon.) Borgmann writes, “Information about reality exhibits its pristine form in a natural setting. An expanse of smooth gravel is a sign that you are close to a river. Cottonwoods tell you where the river bank is. An assembly of twigs in a tree points to ospreys. The presence of ospreys shows that there are trout in the river. In the original economy of signs, one thing refers to another in a settled order of reference and presence.”

These natural signs help us engage with the world around us. As humans we add our cultural signs, marks on paper that become books, lines on parchment that become maps, notes on a staff that become symphonies.

Natural signs and cultural signs are good, says Borgmann. They carry information in ways that help us be more fully human.

But my technology can quickly become my Golem or turn me into a Golem.  Instead of experiencing reality through natural things or cultural things, I may gradually look to my devices. For example, when I referred to the spiders of Santo Antonio de Platina, I did not think to myself, “I’m using YouTube to watch a video of spiders who have built a web in the powerlines above this town in Mexico.” Watching the video becomes my reality. I have experienced the spiders in some way through the video that is different from a natural experience or cultural experience. The device on which I viewed the spider video became a new kind of reality experience. My heart raced when I saw the spiders descending on the town. I ran to show the video to my friends around the office and share the experience with them. At breakfast this morning, I showed the video to my son, and we experienced it together.

I fully embraced the “device paradigm,” allowing technology to deliver an experience. While I watched the spider video on my tiny hand held screen, that device became my reality.

This makes Albert Borgmann very nervous. And it makes me nervous too.  The device paradigm is a natural progression for people. A map helps us understand reality more fully than simply walking around. The map is a cultural sign that enriches our understanding of natural signs. In the same way, technology is enriching the way we engage culture, but it could also be leading us another step away from physical reality.

How far can we travel from physical reality before we lose our souls? If I lose my soul, how will I find it again?

Of course, the game has not played out. The Golem is still looking for its soul, and Moonbot is inviting you to experience the reality they are creating for us. It looks like it will be a beautiful and engaging experience.

I heard a good joke this week.

Imagine you go back to the year 1950 and take a smart phone with you. Then you sit down with a kid, playing with his wooden blocks (remember this is before LEGOs) and try to explain the smart phone.

“It’s a little robot, really,” you explain, “that you can hold in your hand. And it has access to a library of all human knowledge…

And mostly people use it to watch videos of cats.

Why do we watch videos of cats? Because cats are cute. We want something to love, so we love our phones.

If we aren’t careful, we spend time loving our phones instead of loving other people. We spend so much time playing and consuming on our phones we forget how to work and create.

At The High Calling we like Christian theology. In theological terms, we are forgetting how to engage and worship God because we are too busy engaging and worshiping the little gods in our pockets. We don’t carry God in our hearts because we have little gods in our pockets.

Here’s the thing. This is not the fault of technology. It was easy to replace the big God with a little god, because we had already made God so little.

God was our buddy. God was our butler. God was our political tool. God was the ringmaster of our three ring church circus.

We forgot how big God is. God is everywhere. Most Christians still talk a good game. We say we believe God is everywhere, but mostly we expect that to mean that God is in church on a Sunday morning, sitting nicely in a pew with God arms crossed across a God chest not making too much noise when the choir sings or when the preacher speaks. Maybe we sometimes want God to be with us at home or in the hospital. God is in those places of course, but also in the office and in the gym and in the Tivy Antler football stadium and in our technology. God is everywhere. God is even in the moment when you have to plunge the toilet because it is clogged up from something one of the kids flushed down there. Yes, God is even in the toilet.

This is not sacrilege. It is gospel.

The gospel is the good news that the kingdom of God is at hand. It is right here. God is everywhere. We have forgotten what this means.

The High Calling is trying to help people remember. God is bigger than the technology in our pockets, and much more exciting. My phone doesn’t care about me, God does. Many of my Facebook friends and Twitter followers really don’t care about me. God does. Me phone engages me to distraction. God engages me to help him transform the world.

This is the good news. Not merely that God has good ideas for how we should live, not even merely that God sacrificed himself for us, but that God is always with us in everything we do, loving us, cheering us on, helping us do good work, giving us a sense of purpose and calling, and reminding us to keep love at the center of it all.

I do it all the time.

Keller invites us to have a larger view of work, buffered and buttressed by faith, like John Coltrane.

Tim Keller explains that faith set Coltrane free: “Music just became music. It was no longer the currency of his self-esteem… Once God filled his soul, music became about other people. So work is a great thing when it is a servant not a lord.”

Work is about more than just freedom to serve others. It is self-expression as service. And this means your work can have dignity, no matter how menial the task. Keller says, “Martin Luther says God feed everyone that he has made. How does he actually feed us? The farm girl milks the cow, etc. That is how God actually feeds us… so even the most menial tasks have dignity.”

Here’s a quick clip of my favorite bit from his recent interview on MSNBC. (Special thanks to David Rupert and Justin Forman for pointing me to this interview and to ecatoncheires on Flickr for his generous creative commons license on the cow photo.)

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