Hello! Can You Hear Me?

 

I was thinking this morning.... The wedding of the daughter of our Hussey College classmate in Toronto happened at a time when the trade war between the USA and Canada was raging. This triggered a soft war between our classmates from the USA and Canada, with the Canadians jokingly threatening to slam additional tariffs on the USA group on arrival. The USA group threatened that their visit to Toronto was to finalise the annexation of Canada as the 51st State of the USA.

Unfortunately, the day of arrival of the USA team in Canada was when the hotel everyone was lodged, decided to carry out maintenance. Power was shut off, and water ran out. The USA folks went into overdrive, telling everyone exactly how Canada is like a county and needed to be annexed by the USA.

We were yet to hear the last of their complaints on our way to Niagara Falls when we saw this phone booth standing by the side of the gas station we stopped to top our tanks. That again triggered another round of gbas-gbos between the USA and the Canadian teams, with the USA team insisting that Canada is old-school for having phone booths in the era of advanced mobile phones. As they banter, I walked over to the booth, just to confirm if it was functional. As I picked up the handset to my ear and heard the ring tone, like in the movie, Matrix, I was teleported to a realm of musing.

How ironic that we came from an era with little or no mobile phones, but yet communication was great, to today with mobile phones everywhere and we are not communicating. In 1980, there were approximately 400 million telephone lines compared to today, with over 7.4 billion smartphones globally. Today, talk is cheap, but communication is poor. Everyone has a phone, but only a few are communicating. Parents and children are all sitting in the living room, each holding a mobile phone, not for communication, but lost in their respective virtual world.

Mobile phones were meant to improve communication, but it has made it worse. Talking does not mean communication because we can communicate in silence. Beyond communicating, we must seek to understand one another to make the world a better place. No wonder Colossians 4:6 says, "Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer each one." 

Hello! Can you hear me?

Stay hopeful. God's got our back.

Happy Sunday!

......Just the thoughts of a certain Wey Mey