And yet, and yet…

I remember as a kid the thrill when we would get a delivery to the house. It didn’t happen often, so when there was a box on our porch we were filled with wonder. We wondered that someone would take the effort to send us something!

Today as I was driving up to our house, I saw a box on the porch and my heart grew glad. What cool surprise was waiting there? What are we going to discover when we open the box? The suspense was killing me.

It was toilet paper.

Woohoo.

With the blossoming of Amazon Prime and the extraordinary ease of getting anything and everything delivered to our home, gone are the days of anticipation and suspense at the home delivery.

It’s not just home package delivery. It’s home delivery of food (not just pizza anymore), of cookies, of groceries. Through our digital highways, the world has seemingly shrunk to exist only under our fingers.

Alexander wept for there were no other worlds to conquer…lol.

But I stop and think when a person says to just “order” something. We trick ourselves into thinking we are the equal of the ancient tyrants, the whole world at our beckoning. We think we have control of everything, even to the extent of using AI to gild everything.

And yet, we still experience the same lack that we did in the days of the excitement of porch packages.

We still grow lonely, we still grow bored, we still grow anxious. We have most of the languages in the world available through our translation apps, but we don’t speak to anyone. We have any number of food options, but we still gorge ourselves on pizza rolls. We stop growing.

I’ve written before on the beauty of wonder and what it does to the human spirit. Our generation seems to mimic the rich young ruler and Jesus (Matthew 19). We know that we have deeper needs than the apps provide, but we fear what we must do to truly grow. The world of opportunity at our fingertips, but we walk away sad.

We seem to be building a generation of digital camels trying to use AI to get through the needle’s eye.

Maybe sometimes we should take the harder road. Maybe sometimes instead of ordering the stuff to our home so we don’t have to emerge, we should actually walk into the store and purchase the toilet paper. Maybe instead of entering a credit card number into an app, we should wait in line and make eye contact with another human being.

Maybe when we stop pretending that the world waits at our beck and call, we’ll regain some of that joy and thrill of reality.

That’s certainly more exciting than toilet paper.

Signs and wonders y’all.

 ²⁰ The young man said to him [Jesus], “All these I have kept. What do I still lack?” ²¹ Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” ²² When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. Matthew 19:20-22