the Great Fears: the culture of texting and crashing patients.

the culture of texting and chatting. i'm not quite old enough not to claim it as my generation but as the rebellious continent-confused nostalgic francophone Lebanese, i never quite claimed it or enjoyed it.

to be truthful, texting does appeal to me as a means of conversation, avoiding all the necessary polite tournures de phrases before addressing the issue you just wasted seven minutes of your life introducing. i find it hard to relate, empathize and love over the phone so: straight to the point and saving precious minutes here and there, minutes used to knock down other essential items on the to-do list.

saving time, using time, sparing time, for the sake of…? what am i doing with all this time? worrying about time. do i know that i sound crazy? yes, but this is how most of the great philosophical debates and spiritual revelations probably started in history. at least this is how they start for me.

they sound even crazier when God sits me down to type them, or hand write them for the sake of further time saving 

when i was still using a computer that required ten minutes in its two step start up: turn on. three minutes later: hard disk not found. press hard on turn off button. wait two minutes. turn back on. your system shut down unexpectedly, would u like to proceed. yes. 

it was the system of deliberate un-expectation. 

just like waving the image of the man you like out of your brain to trick the Lord who made your brain into giving you what you're not really asking for. because the dark twisted portion of your brain believes that God is whitholding what you want. but i digress.

in the days of the old metal square that believed itself a computer, the typing the beginnings of my great spiritual debates was done with two thumbs on the instantly gratifying screen of an iphone.

all that to say that i fully enjoy the benefits of introverted conversation through  the veil of technology. never through a computer screen surprisingly, but i haven’t had enough time yet over the past six years that this specific symptom has manifested, to elucidate that non-inclination.

back to the main doleances and the intended topic of this post.

perhaps it is my french-nurtured-endless-sentences-with minimal-punctuation-and-twelve-jumbled-thoughts-literrary leanings.

i do not understand, tolerate or forgive multiple small texts sent in a chat-type fashion, in a systematic morse-like pressing of send, like that poor soul you see in catastrophic movies, pushing on his small beeping button, sweating his brain off, in an attempt to save humanity, through the frantic pressing and beeping.

it must be the stuff torture devices are made of. and it makes me almost cry of frustration as i hear more beeping  drilling into my soul in the five seconds it takes me to reach the phone in my tiny (but extremely well-decorated) apartment.

perhaps it is the most commonly unimportant topics usually addressed in chatting-qui-se-veut-texting, i thought. maybe i should address the selfishness in my heart for wanting to love people on my own terms, in my own time, and only on topics that i deem worthy. maybe it has nothing to do with the beeping.

but really if they.were.just.written.in.one.paragraph.

read in one sitting.

one continuous thought.

one nice large blue rectangle on my screen rather that ever appearing new bubbles, making the screen flicker, my brain startle and my heart sink ever so sligthly

and only.one.beep.

yes, i DO have tried changing the ringtone, thank you very much for the suggestion. maybe the same musical note, if repeated so very often, would have driven even Haendel to eradicate it from his Hallelujah all together.

maybe if changed to a traditional ring, the way God and Alexander Graham Bell intended it. #fail

maybe its an undiagnosed lack of affection for specific people communicating. tried and tested. most are deeply cherished face-to-face. or when they send a appropriately sized cyber-communiqué. so it's not the people, it's the bip.

i pray to be someone who loves people, who is quick to repent and willing to serve.

but i really do.bip.not.bip.believe.bip. that the intellectual trauma and the emotional breakdown caused by.bip.the.bip.incessant.bip.beeping. bip.of.bip.multiple.bip.small.bip.texts. is a heart issue.

en passant on the heart issue: if life-giving communication was meant to mimic the heart beat of life, we would have all been speaking in one.word.sentences.like.the.robots.with.the.nasal.voices.in.eighties.movies.

one of the godly women i look up to whole-hearteldly hates group messages. and she loves Jesus. there you go. justification through the spiritual mentor. Jesus never had to deal with group sms and the incessant exasperating bip. nothing to learn there so i'll take the next best example to follow.

 (Although we could arguably analogize that the most certain interruptions of his frequently irritating disciples to the dreaded bip. which disciples he didn’t turn off with a mighty smack of his hand. have i ever mentioned how thankful I am for the faithfully recorded irksomeness of the same disciples who were loved and sent to make similar disciples of all nations? but I digress again)

my inner therapist truly believes this is related to The Great Fear.

Of Getting Paged, that is, about a Crashing Patient.

The Great Fear Of Getting Paged about a Crashing Patient while standing in line with other sleep-deprived people-studying-to-help-people, in the cafeteria twelve floors below, for the first meal in 10.5 hours, trying to grab the last stale salad before the grumpy lady at the cashier’s station decrees closing time.

The Great Fear Of Getting Paged about a Crashing Patient while on an excruciating elevator ride with a bored- and confused about disease and death in a fallen world- child pushing every floor button.

The Great Fear Of Getting Paged about a Crashing Patient while returning the last six pages of the last minute and the half.

The Great Fear Of Getting Paged about a Crashing Patient while trying to softly communicate your medical point of view on a landline, all your senses helplessly witnessing the sinister beeping and the flashing arrows of multiplying unreturned calls grow increasingly bright and terrifying on the tiny pager screen.

The Great Fear Of Getting Paged about a Crashing Patient while trying to phonecall a hello to your mother 3000 miles away (preaching to yourself that an eight hour time difference makes being awake at 3:49 am allright), pretending to call her to check on her while truthfully really just needing to hear a friendly loving voice on your seemingly eternal terrifying cold and eerie night.

The Great Fear Of Getting Paged about a Crashing Patient while wrapped in a plastic sterile tent, because the hospital only carries extra-large sterile gowns, trying to focus on sticking a two millimeter wide vein in someone’s father’s neck through your blurry eyes and scratched eyeglasses.

The Great Fear Of Getting Paged about a Crashing Patient while running in a reception-free hallway trying to return a page from ten minutes ago on your cell phone, while the terrifying beeping continues on the machine of death strapped on your waist, its radiations dangerously close to your ovaries-the kind of thoughts that penetrate your exhausted brain at 3:52 in the morning.

and to alleviate the drama and terror of the above descriptions for non-medical personal, The Great Fear Of Getting Paged about a Crashing Patient while trying to empty your twelve-hour-full bladder while simultaneously-and precariously- trying to hydrate for the first time in said hours.

if The Great Fear is the root trauma behind the trauma of the texting bip, la boucle est bouclée and brings us to the explosive knot in the vicious circle.

why don’t i just silence my phone. and stop complaining, and wasting analytical power and people's time. 

because The Great Fear is above all missing a text about someone crashing. in my life that is. because buried in the midst of all the blue bubbles and important-but delayable-topics may be a truly emergent message. unlikely you say, but not in my conditioned brain. not in the volatile middle east. (cf:explosive 3 lines above). not in a hospital's operating room for a last chance to say goodbye.

the conviction of brilliance

i'm not stupid. let's just start by stating that simple, accurate baseline truth, agree and move forward. as a corollary, we can also agree that i'm not very humble either. and as we're agreeing on character traits, i'm an incessant arguer. but i will not argue about not being humble.

its important to establish a baseline in the conversation.

now regarding my general absence of stupidity. (wait, excluding fits of anger at inopportune moments, some relationships i decided would be fruitful, and the inability to season food---salty only, i manage beautifully with sweets, coming from a long line of sweet-toothed stubborn diabetics).....
humm i wonder if i can call all of these something else and still claim intelligence, here i go again..


renaming the above: anger issues, discernment issues, extreme spontaneity, a conviction of being able to change, or better yet save people, and reluctance to put in the time to learn to cook.

but intellectually, I've had historical fits of brilliance.
of which i never actually understood the springing mechanism
acute and delicate insights one day, clueless the next
mastered my high school literature and philosophy class, unable to grasp the symbolism of a cult movie the next decade

so when i never understood the Bible, all of it, the writing style (not even noticing that "style" needed to be plural), the good news, the symbolism or lack thereof, the awe-inspiring Spirit, the punctuation, the what-i-thought-were-really-bad-bedtime-stories, the what-i-thought-was-a-lame-attempt-at-poetry, and the i-cant-tell-anyone-that-i-don't-understand-what-the-big-deal-is-all-about.

times of shame and arrogance.

in my mind, if i am brilliant, and by own doing, who else's?, and don't get this, it must be its fault

i mean, come on, look at me! i was reading great authors, had memorized exquisite poetry, was an avid cinephile of independent alternative movie-making.
i was slowly but surely on a path on intellectual and cultural eliteness.
slowly and painfully and exhaustingly and terrified of missing out on the next creative movement and be kicked out of the club.

a club where a pervasive sense of discomfort, lack-of-fulfillment, fear instead of satisfaction, were feelings that i had numbed down. and i had no time to decipher the Word of God.
i knew that was the right thing to call it, i knew the right answers because that is what an intellectual does. i was waiting for a feeling to kick in and make me magically understand this book BEFORE i open it. because i had no time to waste.

not that i was praying to understand it.
prayer was another right answer, a didactic accompanying an empathetic facial expression at funerals, or sessions of comforting friends breaking up, or neighbors experiencing health issues, etc, you get the picture...
prayer wasn't for me or by me. it was a word, a good sentence closure, a visit-ender, i'm praying for u, good luck with everything, bye! and a lie i recognized uttering every time i promised it to someone.

the shock that followed understanding the Good News still lingers.lingers in my head. my heart is at peace and at joy and at awe, and the journey keeps springing amazement at who God is. i dont know how He managed to pierce my hard stubborn, arrogant know-it-all heart, but that's what He does. He is amazing.

the shock lingers in my head still. the fact that with all my brilliance, intellect, years of church going, i had not comprehended a tiny, plain, simple sentence. Jesus died for your sins. what does that even mean?

that was a while back, and we've had a bumpy journey. where i was still kicking and screaming, and pouting in a corner and crossing my arms in refusal when He would hand me my Bible to read, and laughing at him when He would say the word discipline, and pressing play on a cult movie on Netflix when He would call me to talk to Him.

but i have learned discipline and i'm still learning. when i don't run away and actually sit and read my Bible, i am in awe and in beautiful shock and in adoration at what i'm learning.


see, working for an intellectual eliteness reputation is the biggest obstacle of all for asking questions.  because you cannot afford to look stupid when you are building your own kingdom. what does this crazy story have to do with jesus? you only ask the questions that will confuse others, and to which you have invented the answers to assert your intellectual superiority. and soon you will stop asking even yourself these questions, wait, why did jesus come to die again? because if you don't believe in your kingdom, then who else will?


The great lethal irony of misdirecting the occasional fits of greatness that He gave, and using them to judge His world, His word, and Him, building up from there to where you don't understand anything at all. what kind of Love digs into that, uninvited, to make all things new?