Today in a flash, I saw the effects of the drug in the micro world of a Panera booth. Exiting from a morning of email on the free wireless, I passed human bookends, matching parents; both sitting together, with their smart phones, in the same hand (right) fingering their respective screens with the one appendage that gives us digital alacrity, freedom, the opposable thumb, useful. What was tragic for this mom and dad was one vacuous reality. Across from them, was a most delightful young man, about 7 years old, wanting, yearningly to engage his parents faces, but to no avail. They were tripping on their techno. Soaked in either a text or and inspirational message or the next pair of shoes that must be had…I don't know. This little champion looked up at me as I walked by, with hollow, lonely eyes, as if to say, "Who cares about me?" "Do I matter?" "Where are my parents faces?"
Practical living tells me that in a half hour, the "bookends" will drop "champion" off at class. They will go to work, and he will be walking in the isle to his desk at school, immersed in various classmates gazes and greetings, from every walk of life, some you just might not want to know more about…really. His morning was faceless. In that golden hour of connection perhaps the technology could just have been put away, in exchange for a little conversation, a little warm love in the form of familiar smiles and affirming words from mom and daddy-o. Are they parenting and intermittently temporary orphan, who is sporadically abandoned for one more fix of vital information, the temperature and 24 hour forecast and those shoes?
I wanted to stop at their table that morning and say, "Do you love that little guy across the table, and do you see the hourglass over his head, and your head, and over every soul of man in this place?" (Damoclese sword might just as well been an hourglass, eh?) "Are you alive to the moments of a child's curious life like this boy, that are as precious as the very next breath you will breath? Is there anything more important, right now, that placing thunderous, extravagant, simple love beneath his Spirit and preparing him for a day of engagement with humanity that will pull, push and press him into a spectrum of emotions, words and snotty punches or worse or better? I didn't stop; so I am a sinner, guilty, for a crime of omission, not speaking love when I could have. Or perhaps it was the fear of being misunderstood as a sentimental old fart who sees a kid who just wants to hear his parents talk some love to him at breakfast.
I'm to a Ludite. I'm just thinking there are great times to shut the stinkin' tech off and give your lovely face away to a friend or a kid or your wife or boyfriend or?
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