God offline for scheduled maintenance?

 

About a week ago, Twitter was taken offline for scheduled maintenance in the middle of the day. As a result, there was a considerable amount of grumbling across the web—especially in blogs—regarding the incident.

For those who do not yet know, Twitter is nothing short of a networking phenomenon. You type what you are doing at the moment, and people who have elected to follow you can read it. You can choose to follow the ‘tweets’ of other people as well. That’s it. Well, folks have really become quite attached to it and when it gets taken away, even for an hour, things can get dicey.

All of this caused me to start thinking about prayer. God, the author of the universe, is always online—always. We can login anytime we want. He knows each of us by name and we do not need a password. Every prayer that has ever escaped the hearts of humankind is a direct message that finds its way to him. He reads each and every one with intense interest. And even though it may take a while for him to answer, he will do just that.

Just like a tag cloud , it would be very interesting to see which prayer topics in the prayer stream were the most popular at any given time. We might see topics such as illness, marriage, world hunger, salvation, deliverance and general help. There might even be some gratitude and a few pony requests in there somewhere. It is wonderful that we have been gifted the ability to enjoy a genuine, real-time relationship with he who made us. But what if, for some reason, God went offline for an hour?

Yes, it is true that there are times in our lives when we feel as though God is silent. Yet as believers, in the back of our hearts, we know he is there. I, personally, do not want to imagine a single hour that I was unable to access God. Worse still, I don’t want to imagine an hour that God could not, or would not, access me.

In a society where being connected has become king, it is easy to forget that the most important connection we have is between us and God, which was made possible through the service of his Son. This is the whole point. This is why we labor. This is why we tell others.

Just like a Twitter profile page, we can look at the lives of those we know and we see all of the different people and things that they follow. Sure, God is following them, but they refuse to reciprocate and click the ‘follow’ button next to God’s name. We might even suggest they follow him on #followfriday, but they ignore it. Why? Probably because along with God’s name, we are sending them @judgment, @hypocrisy and @I-am-better-than-you. Perhaps we ought to look at our own profiles and unfollow a few things first.

Regardless, it is a great comfort to know that God is always ready to receive our prayers. He never shuts down for maintenance. His stream is always active. He follows all of our lives and he patiently waits for us to follow him. Through his Son, we are members of the greatest social network in creation: the family of God.

Tweet this to a friend.
 

-T. Michael Cart (@tmichaelcart)