Lausanne World Pulse – World Pulse Archives – World Pulse Archives

I predict that this column will not win me many friends. Instead I will probably be maligned as out of date, a throwback to the dinosaur age. Yes, I admit that such charges contain some truth. Once I mentioned to my brother, Tom, that when it comes to computers, I’m just barely crawling out of Jurassic Park. He replied, “If you’re just crawling out of Jurassic Park, I haven’t even oozed out of the primeval slime yet !”

Everyone from my generation knows that our five-year-old grandchildren can instruct us on the intricacies of the computer. We all know that the computer and the Internet are now the center of our culture, and there is no way out of this. I accept this as a fact of life.

However, being the “old fogey” that I am, I am going through a reactionary syndrome against the tyranny that the computer exercises over our lives. When I returned in 1995 to serve as president of the Latin America Mission, this coincided with the period when e-mail had skyrocketed to the place of dominance in correspondence. I have been in positions of some executive responsibility for nearly 50 years, and correspondence has always been one of my strengths (if I have any). My first priority was to handle the correspondence each day. I could usually handle it fairly rapidly.

However, with the arrival of e-mail my time for handling correspondence actually quadrupled. It took me four times as long to answer e-mail as it had taken to handle hard copy mail. Missionary prayer letters used to consume a major block of time for the missionary. One had to type the letter, mimeograph the letter, add personal notes to a few, address and stamp the envelopes, stuff and seal the envelopes and get them to the post office. Thus prayer letters were sometimes few and far between.

Now with e-mail, one writes the letter, taps one key and off it goes. So the missionary will write far more often. This is good, as it keeps our friends and supporters up to date. That is commendable.

This also means that letters today are far longer and more detailed. This is the downside. In the office I received infinitely more mail than before, and usually the letters were much longer and filled with irrelevant details. One missionary wrote frequently about what the dentist had done to his back molar, or gave clinical details about some relative’s health problems, which had nothing to do with his ministry on the field. But I had to wade through this before finding anything that I needed to know as president of the mission.

And then there are the well meaning friends who feel that every political column, joke, sermonette, interesting story, etc. that they find will be of special interest to me. So my screen gets clogged with unsolicited and unwanted extras. But I have to open them to be sure that there is not something there of importance to me.

Last year my wife and I were invited on a cruise across the Atlantic. It was a beautiful trip, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Another fine missionary was on the same cruise. He had been invited and paid for, because he needed a break from working hard in a very difficult country. During the cruise he spent much of the time in his cabin below deck pouring over his laptop to keep up on his work. He seldom came on deck to enjoy the sun or the sea with his wife. I greatly admired his single-hearted dedication to his work, an outstanding ministry, but I felt sad for the tyranny that the computer exercised over his life. My friend seemed not to realize that even Jesus saw the need for a break when he said, “Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest” (Mark 6:31).

Recently a friend was appalled to find out that I seldom use the Internet. “You mean you don’t even use it for research?” he exclaimed. I assured him that I do use it once in a while, but I refuse to allow the computer to exercise a tyranny over me. My friend, Charles Hummel of IVCF, years ago wrote a significant little booklet entitled The Tyranny of the Urgent. He showed how urgent tasks tend to dominate our lives and crowd out some less urgent but equally important aspects. The principles he developed there are applicable to the tyranny of the computer.

With all the great advances that the computer brings to mission work, and I applaud them, we need to recognize that this mechanical tool can also become a tyrannical master. Paul exhorts us to “Never be lacking in zeal, but keep spiritual fervor, serving the Lord” (Rom. 12:11). This requires more than a computer.