Chained and liberated

 Lutherans, it seems to me, ought to feel most at home with technology. Martin Luther explained the paradoxical "Freedom of a Christian" thusly: "I am a perfectly free lord of all, servant to none," he said, and also "a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all."

With each new technology, those behind it optimistically predict our liberty increasing by leaps and bounds. An unintentionally funny 1978 print ad for email showed bright lines shooting all around an office and a startled executive, like the little gold tracks that follow Tinker Bell in the movie Peter Pan. By the time a plurality of people started having desktop computers, futurists were enthusiastically promoting a "paperless office."

We might use a lot less paper -- my last two jobs have allowed me to chart interactions with residents and patients on the computer -- but we're far from paperless. And email, so quickly hailed as a time saver, did not take long to turn into a burden. Articles promote tips and tricks to help harried individuals thin out their email inboxes. Some email services let you select a whole page's worth and delete them at one shot, if you wish to be so cavalier.

Likewise, voice mails. It used to be they were a convenient alternative to calling someone over and over and just missing them. Now we play phone tag, and many people (I'm among them) infinitely prefer to receive a text message. It's like having my own personal secretary. The information is all right there, and I can deal with it in a reasonably prompt fashion. When the phone rings, by contrast, I have to drop what I'm doing and answer it. Sometimes the caller wants information I can't give them at the moment because it's stored on the phone I am on.

So - technology sometimes means we are "subject to all."

On the other hand! Technology is helping us immeasurably in the selling of one house and buying of another. Our Realtor in North Carolina sends an email via Docusign, and we electronically sign everything and send the papers back. Ditto the papers on the house we are buying in Virginia. It's not the same service, it's a similar one, but I'm not sure I will actually lay eyes on the Realtor until we close. Maybe not even then. 

Just now, I used an app on my phone to photograph documents and send them to the administrators of my church-based retirement account, from which we are drawing the money for the up-front costs of buying the house. In just a few seconds, I got a check mark on my screen. I didn't even have to mail the documents to Minnesota, wait for them to arrive, and wait some more for someone to process them.

Without the technology, selling our house would mean multiple eight-hour round trips between Newport News, Va., and Greensboro, NC. That's where the "perfectly free" part comes in. For all its leg irons, technology sometimes proves quite convenient. 

Just don't get me started on faxes.