Darcy - reaction to our first session

Last night we met for the first time in our technology and faith session of our small group. Already someone had talked to one of our members about the blog before it had even been unveiled to all of our group! That was exciting and imediatly set us in the mood that technology could facilitate our faith by both helping us understand our own spirituality and God's grace along with inviting others to share in this exploration, even if only through reading the blog. I should mention that anyone in the area is welcome to come to our meetings. I put an age guideline up, but it really was a guess and I am going to add "the young at heart" or "pre family stage" to the listings. Besides, our pastors Kim and Greg are the proud parents of a junior in highschool and an 8th grader and they participate. Anyone is welcome :)

We also covered possible uses of technology to enhance our faith such as research on spiritual topics, which is suprisingly well facilitated by wikipedia, and GodTube, and google. There are plenty of sights that could start your intellectual and spiritual wheels turning. Also we discussed (quite a bit sense it is the biggest niche for our generation right now) facebook and how it can be used to read your daily Bible verses, converse about spiritual topics, and express a side of yourself that might not be seen in casual conversations.

However, it seems the bulk of our discussion centered on the difficulties that technology has brought to our generation including: desensitization, and the reversal oversenitization, distorted views of beauty and virtue, lose of moral sense due to anyonimity, time "killing", and having too much noise/busyness to "be still and know that I am God."

We considered how technology like the atom bomb have devestated humanity and still somehow allowed growth. But this was a tricky topic, because it is sometimes hard to see progress through extreme devestation, and even when progress is seen it is sometimes hard to see progress as God's plan so much as mans. An interesting idea we tackled: Is progress God's thing or is it the creation of man? Does God love us more when we create new things, advance our health systems, or are able to access more information? It is a hard set of questions that leads one to consider what are humanities goals for us and what are God's goals for us.

We thought about whether God forged a path of technological progress and if man were playing out God's plan, but I think most of us thought more that God's gift of free will has allowed this growth and whatever else it may be. However, one of the main ideas was that God would love humanity at whatever progress we were in our epochs or stages, and that humanity has covered some dark areas of history and that we generally do seem pretty well off in our day of age.

Our concluding thought was on the best possible way to use technology responsibly considering our spiritual self. We concluded that the internet would be responsbily used building real realitionships based in truth. And while 'real realationships' can be tricky, the idea that we are genuine in who we are and that we seek to connect on deeper levels then casual internet occurences made sense to me. We also decided that we should occasionaly take 'technology retreats,' having segments of our day, week, or life that we take a break from technology and try to still our minds and stimulus in order to be still and let God enter into our minds and hearts.