September 23, 2013
Innovative
As though he were on an amusement park ride the child in the
grocery cart came straight at me giggling and waving arms and legs in the air.
It took me a second to realize the young dad was pushing the cart from the
basket rather than the handle, giving his son the full effect of facing forward
with nothing obstructing his view. They reminded me of bobsledders as they sped
through the produce isle with the child as the driver and the dad as the
brakeman. I am amazed at this innovative father who found a way to let his child
look forward. I’m thinking we believers could learn something here…looking
forward can be much more exciting than looking backwards at where we just came
from.
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Gail;
-----I just came across this word “innovative” earlier this morning. I paused a moment, and reflected upon it’s connotation for our present situation. Everything is innovative, or it is nowhere. It is what requires me buy a new version of QuickBooks every year. It makes me rue the fact I can no longer obtain Quickverse 4, the last version of Parson’s Bible software to sport the really efficient search engine. It’s what makes your car doors lock automatically, and sometimes sends you back to the house for another set of keys after getting out to clear frost from the windshield. It has made cataract surgery simple, healthcare unaffordable, entertainment spectacular, and worldview godless. Josephus wrote of one of Judah’s kings who defeated Edom and brought back a great deal of booty, including some of their idols. With these, as Josephus expressed it, he became innovative.
-----One of my favorite riddles is: “What goes backward at the same time it is taking you forward to everywhere you go?” I suppose all the fun of a riddle is the guessing and suspense of “will you or won’t you figure the answer.” But then, we can probably dispense with this unfortunately missing aspect anyway, since my purpose of using the riddle here is to make a point rather than to have some fun. Have you guessed it yet? Time is an unstoppable forward movement which forces your mind ever forward by even your mere observation of the activities around you. Everything you do in response to time’s forward motion is done by the forward motion of your mind. Your mind takes you everywhere you go, but it takes you nowhere without relating what you know to where you must go. What you know is made of your experiences in the past, to where your mind continually goes as it picks and pieces together the route forward you‘ve desired. So even though the mind is embedded in innovation constantly, it moves there within the corral panels of the past.
-----Innovation is indeed one of the Lord’s many blessings. So also is the constraint of wisdom, that application of relevant knowledge and past experience to the guidance of innovation’s course unto safety and prosperity. It comes from looking backward at Daddy who’s steering the cart with a firm grip at both your sides. I’m not much for all the panic, stricken, fearism that rules over the modern mind. It soon will be cultural to don your safety helmet as your first act upon rising in the morning. Yet I did learn before my adulthood how dangerous is even minor horseplay. And the more innovative the horseplay, the more precaution is scuttled. I don’t often run my shopping cart into things in the supermarket, but I do occasionally. Daddy rightly figured how much fun his kid would have riding at the very fore-part of his cart’s motion, right up there where impact occurs. He also rightly figured nothing would happen, not because nothing could happen, but only because it didn’t. He won’t be able to say that if sometime it does happen. That day will for him humble innovation to the mundane, making him dry and boring, like me.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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