I’ve had my i-pad for a couple of weeks. I love it. I sleep with it. Okay that last one needs an explanation. I use it in bed and sometimes I fall asleep and it’s still in the bed. You can do lots of cool things with it. You can watch movies, read books and magazines, play games. And, yes, it is an incredible help in my legal practice, and in my role as “webmaster” for my church. Well, you just have to try it for yourself. It’s very intuitive. My three year old great grand child just picks it up and starts doing amazing things with it.
In watching her play with it, I realized that she was doing things more efficiently than I was. Shortly after that I stumbled upon the User Guide. For you ipad-ers, it’s a favorite on Safari, the web browser. More amazing, I read it. I’m the type that throws away instruction manuals with the packing when I get something new. So manual reading isn’t my forte’.
The darn thing has a manual and I read it and now refer to it often. I view myself as an emerging i-pad expert, but self-delusion is a subject for another day. There are at least two significant lessons for today.
First, my three year old grand daughter can do some things better than I can. This lesson was enforced this week. I’m a fixer and I believe many people in my life rely on me. (I have to start working on that self-delusion blog piece real soon.) We have been having trouble with our cable. I haven’t been able to get if fixed. My grand daughter (the twenty-something not her three year old daughter) in frustration finally asked me to let her deal with it. Shortly after the problem was fixed. She called Cox. What a uniquely brilliant solution. Trying to find a manual online and doing it myself seemed so brilliant at the time. She did a better job than I had. It’s a tough point to come to: the realization that maybe those younger than you can do things better than you can. But isn’t that part of God’s plan? If God grants us a long enough life, we are given years as student, years as producer, years as teacher, then our final years as cheerleader. It can be tricky being aware what period we are in and when we need to move on to the next season of life.
Our ultimate satisfaction depends on making the best of each of those life periods. A good student makes a good producer. The life lessons picked up as a producer…produce a good teacher. Passing off what we have learned earns us the position of cheerleader for the precious ones God gives us.
The second lesson? There is a manual for this. We don’t have to guess and fumble. He’s given us a manual. We would be wise to use it. How often I would have avoided pain for myself and others, if I had read the manual first.
All this pontificating has earned me a nap. I think I deserve it. After that I’ll get to work on self-delusion.
Be blessed.
Nick
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