At my heart, I’m a geek. No, not a geek. A hacker. Some of you are hackers and don’t know it. According to Wikipedia’s 3rd definition a hacker is someone “who combines excellence, playfulness, cleverness and exploration in performed activities”. [Tweet That]
You can check it out here. So, I do work with computers and web technology a lot. Mainly because the ecosystem makes the barrier for entry cheaper. Really though, I’ve also worked on cars, houses, and I work in the church. I can apply the definition above to all of these areas. I tend to do that. Looking at things and asking “how can these things get better?” You may say you want that, but trust me, it’s a double-edged sword. I’ll come back to that, let’s talk about design.
I ran across two articles on design a while back. First one here and then here. These were excellent articles regarding user interaction. Especially considering we live in a world where everyone thinks that a world viewed through glass is amazing. We think it’s so amazing we’re addicted to it.[Tweet That]
If it was up to us, the keypads on our SUV’s would be a screen that we swipe to unlock (a bad idea given the context). So let’s change context and talk about church.
If church were an interface, what would you change? Depending on the church I’d change some things. Picture a split in the screen of your mind and imagine yourself as a guest visiting A) a church for the first time and B) a Starbucks for the first time. What differences do you see? In a Starbucks if the barista asks you if you’re a 1st time visitor, then announces it and everyone claps and cheers my guess is that you’d never go back. Why do some of us think this is OK at a church?
So what’s the point of this? With church, with iPhones and iPads? For me the question comes back to “Why are we so easily satisfied?” This is true for life in general. Not just User Interfaces or Experiences. This is true of your spiritual journey.
C.S. Lewis stated it this way:
[quote]It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.[/quote]
The challenge for me is to hack. Hack my technology, my house, my church, my spiritual journey. To improve upon my improvements. To continue iterating through each improvement with the question “How can this get better?” I want to leave this world better than I found it. I want to participate with God in His creative acts by taking up His challenge to cultivate (make better) the garden (world around us).[Tweet That]
Will you join me in this journey? What will you hack today?
