Off the Bottom of My Screen

I have noticed there is a phenomenon at play in my life that drastically affects all I do. I suspect that it may be at play in your life as well. I call it "The Bottom of My Screen Syndrome". Basically it works like this: my life seems to revolve around people contacting me via emails. (Even my telephone voice mails at one job get automatically emailed to me as Mp3's.) They pile into my in box at a terrific rate. They come in fast enough that I can't possibly reply to all of them, so I find myself sort of randomly replying to the ones that are not urgently sent from someone work-related. Therefore, as soon as the emails disappear off the bottom of my screen...they join the thousands of others down there, and they are literally out of sight, out of mind. The only encouraging thing about this is that I don't yet have a Blackberry...which has an even smaller screen and thus subjects more and more of my emails to the "bottom of my screen" reality. Ironically, as I write this bulletin article it is this reality that causes me to forget to send an article to Carrie much of the time!

Sadly, we live in a culture where this is the way we operate. Priorities are often sacrificed because they get pushed off the bottom of our screens. Whoever shouts the loudest or sends the most SPAM gets our attention. God, who does not play that game, often gets pushed so far down the screen that we never even think of him. We are too busy handling the things on our screens... regardless of whether they are all that important.

Paul did not have this problem. God never left his screen, never became an after thought, and never got pushed aside by the worries of the day. This was true of Paul before he met Jesus, as he endeavored to serve his Lord as a Pharisee of Pharisees. But it was even more true of his life AFTER he met Jesus. Before he met Jesus on the road to Damascus he was passionate about serving God, but after he met Jesus he began giving speeches like the one he gave in Acts 17, where he said, "God is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else."

What was it that kept service to God on Paul’s screen even after he realized that the old-school-Pharisee motivation for serving God was not the main reason to serve him?

Mark