Do you enjoy your smartphone?  Most of us who have them do.  We love them, yet we hate them, too.  We love what they do for us, and we recoil at what they are doing to us.  But we know we can't turn back the clock to the days of pay phones only.  We cannot be the Luddites of the Industrial Revolution, those who rejected the technologies that the Revolution introduced to the Western world.  Unless we live in the world of Jules Verne's Time Machine or Steven Spielberg's Back to the Future, we cannot go back in time.  As the writer of Ecclesiastes wisely observes, "What is crooked cannot be straightened" (3:15).
     And why should we?  Can we really, fully, assess the impact of what we do today?  Can the older generation, those who grew up with pay phones, really discern the fullness of what the absence of pay phones is doing to the younger generation?  So little could those who impelled the Industrial Revolution, those brilliant inventors and innovative entrepreneurs who developed and marketed the devices on which we still rely today, imagine the impact of what they were doing one hundred years hence.  Like all of us, they were creatures of their time, working for what they considered to the betterment of the generations of their days.  They thought, they made, they continued on.
     As do we.  We work in our time to build on what has come before us.  People may lament the way that the Industrial Revolution undermined human belief in a sovereign and personal God, yet they cannot dismiss the usefulness of what the Revolution brought us.  It has lengthened and saved countless lives.  None of us, religious or not, wants to return to the days that preceded it.  We wish to live with what we have.
     And who we have become.  So what do we do?  We admit the wonder and caprice of existence, and hold on, believing that if God indeed created the world, it still has meaning and everything that it generates and unfolds will, too.  We're just along for the ride.
     And we ride.