I have a Blackberry or Crackberry or whatever you want to call it.  I resisted for a long time.  I had so any friends that were hopelessly addicted and that couldn’t carry on a conversation without looking down at that little screen every two minutes.  I even had a friend end up in two casts because he gave himself carpel tunnel from thumbing his keypad too much! Crazy!  But the time came where I did want the freedom of being able to get out of the office but still be in touch, so I took the plunge.

I am not a great technology guy.  My Mac, my iPod, my phone—I know how to make them do what I want them to do but I certainly don’t use the technology to the extent that I could.  So sometimes things happen that I don’t understand, can’t explain and can’t figure out.  That happened to me with my Blackberry a couple weeks ago.

I looked down at my phone and there was a little smiley face icon at the top of the screen with a 1 next to it, like I had a message, but it wasn’t the normal message icon, just this little smiley face.  I spent a lot of time over the next couple of days trying to figure out what that smiley face meant.  Was it a message that someone sent?  If so, why didn’t it show up in my inbox?  And for at least 10 days it really bothered me.  I like to keep a tidy phone and having a random smiley face on there was no good!

Now I am a pretty creative guy and a writer and I love a good story, so what happened is that I created a little story for the smiley face to help me accept that it was there and may be forever.  This is far-fetched but stick with me: remember when John baptized Jesus and the Spirit comes down like a dove from heaven and God say, “This is my son in whom I am well pleased.”  Remember that?  We’ll I have determined that this smiley face came from God and that it’s his way of letting me know that he is pleased with me.  Every time I look at my phone and I see it I think about God smiling down on me.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get rid of that smiley face, but if it went away now I’d be really bummed because I like being reminded that God is pleased with me.  And it sneaks up on me.  There are times in any given day where I feel bad about myself—I say something unkind or think something inappropriate or get wrong-headed over this situation or that and in those times my assumption is that God feels about me the way I feel about myself.  How self-centric is that?!  To assume that God’s feelings and thoughts are as lowly and human as mine is just nuts.

But then I look at this goofy little smiley and it is just enough of a reminder that God is pleased with me because he sees my new nature, the redeemed me, that came at the price of his son.  And he smiles down on me or at least sends me a little something to live on my phone to remind me of that.  I know this is weird and it’s a stretch but I suppose we all have some weird little thing that God uses in our lives to remind us of his love.

Filed under: AFFIRMATION by toben