Saturday, April 01, 2006

Changing Clocks

For those that live outside Indiana, it's no big deal. I grew up doing it too, changing the clock ahead an hour every spring and changing it back an hour every fall. Whoopiddee-doo. But for some it's amazing how these tiny little changes affect their life. How any small deviation from the mundane causes their world to crash. I honestly wonder how many people are going to be an hour late for church tomorrow...

But it's true. My wife works in the church office and changed our monthly newsletter. Now, one complaint about the newsletter by those who assembled it was the stapler. There was always problems with the stapler. So, she made it new without staples. What a crazy idea. The people who assemble it were mad and frustrated. One of their complaints: no staples.

It seems like some people would rather live with things harder than learn something new. Even if the new way is better, easier, faster, more reliable, whatever, it's safer to stay in routine and they like it that way. Take our keyboard for example. I'm typing this on a standard qwerty keyboard, the same that is used all over the world. But do you know why these letters are in this order below my fingers. Why the z, x, and c are all next to each other when they're barely used. It's really quite simple. Years ago there were no computers, only typewriters, and the biggest problem with typewriters was if you hit two keys too quickly (too soon after each other), the keys would stick and you'd have to pry them apart. How do you solve this problem? Put the keys in an order that forces the people typing to type slower.

That's right, the letters on your keyboard were put in that order to make you type slower. We could easily type way faster if we moved them around and learned the new system. So why don't we? Change. People fear change. They would rather use something that is comfortable than learn something new, no matter how bad it is.

It's kind of funny that God would design a world like that. He never changes (Hebrews 13:8, James 1:17) yet He created a world that lives and breathes on change. Seasons change, temperature changes, weather changes, night and day, water levels rise and fall. The entire planet is built on change. Maybe we should be more open and accepting to things God wishes to change, or even using newer keyboards or flyers without staples or even changing clocks if they help us work better...

T

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