My iPad cracked the other day.
My wife and I had just gotten back from my parents’ house, and we were laden with food and packages and old magazines and newspaper clippings … and somewhere in the midst of all that stuff, the iPad was watching, waiting. Perhaps it got a glimpse of the front yard through the open garage door or felt the bracing December breeze, and that stirred up some strange, mysterious yearnings buried within its binary code. Whatever the reason, it decided to make a break for it—and instead got broken on our cement garage floor.
It still seems to work OK, the brave little trooper that it is. But a fissure runs diagonally across the screen now, and when I first noticed it, I admit it made me a little sick. While I suspect my iPad may actually like the crack (it makes it look edgy and tough; a tablet computer not to be messed with), it was just another reminder to me of how frail these gadgets—these instruments that we depend on so much—are.
My iPad isn’t just a toy—it’s a warehouse for my life. I’ve got notes on there, and appointments and reminders. I play games on it. I research. I have 20 years worth of family photos stored on the thing. Granted, it’s not as if that stuff would just vanish if my iPad had successfully made its break for freedom; most of it resides elsewhere, too. But what if that crashed, too? What if it all just went away?
Many of my co-workers are dealing with their own cantankerous computers. One was exposed to Microsoft’s infamous blue screen of death—a site that so terrified her, she ran out to buy a new laptop. Another friend is scrambling to pull whatever he can off his dying hard drive.
We’ve been told since we were kids to back up our data. But what happens if the backup goes kablooey, too? We have access to the “cloud,” but is that really that much more secure? And what if you have a lousy home Internet feed, like me, and you’re never quite sure whether you’ll be able to get to the cloud when you need it? Our computers and gadgets aren’t any safer than the chests and file cabinets and strong boxes of yesteryear. In fact, they can feel downright flimsy.
“Do not store up for yourselves treasure on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal,” Jesus tells us in Matthew 6:20. If He was speaking today, Jesus might well remind us of the perils of faulty hard drives and restless iPads. In this world of ours, nothing is truly safe: That’s cold comfort, of course, for those who’ve lost precious documents or irreplaceable family videos to a crash (and I’m certainly one of them), but it’s still true. We can’t rely on the things of this world. We just can’t. In a broken world, things break. Everything around us—including us—comes with a finite warranty.
Store your treasures in heaven, Jesus tells us, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Yeah, that’s easy to say, not so easy to embrace. After all, it’s not treasure we’re talking about here, not stacks of cash or coin: It’s the review I’m working on, the story I’m tinkering away at, the pirate game I’ve spent hours on, the book I’m reading. It’s the pictures, the videos. It’s my life! It’s important! It’s … well, all the stuff I treasure.
Let me be honest with you: I still treasure my treasure. My family photos are so precious to me that I have backups of my backups.
But I think my iPad, with its daring escape attempt, was trying to remind me of something: That when we bury ourselves under a bunch o’ stuff, we can forget that God wants us to do more than count our coin or work on that incredibly important document or even leaf through family photos. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in all that stuff we fail to see that it’s all just piles in an attic or stacks in a garage … and that there’s a glorious world right outside the garage door—waiting for us to leap into and explore.
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