“It is good for a man to bear the yoke in his youth” (Lamentations 3:27)
When I was in high school, someone taught me to type. Just after college, they taught me to run the teletype and then to work a mimeograph machine. Eventually, someone installed a computer in my office. I said, “Where do you turn it on? It has no on/off switch.”
In the 1990s when teaching (occasionally) at our seminary, I entered the classroom carrying books and a Bible. Everything about the class was hand-written or typed. In recent years, everyone brought laptops into the classroom, and much of the work was paperless, posted on academic websites set up just for this purpose. I graded “papers” without leaving my desk, without taking my eyes off the computer, without lifting a pencil.
Recently, I’ve been writing a series of devotions for a quarterly magazine in our denomination. The process was anything but simple. The editor emailed me an attachment containing instructions, a contract, samples of past devotionals, and most puzzling of all, templates for the ten articles. Think of a template as a mold into which one pours his writings. A little goes here (the title and date), a little goes there (the text, and one verse in particular that is typed out), and so forth. One template for each day, making ten in all. When these are all complete, I send them in via the internet, my cover letter with ten attachments.
The thought occurred to me today….