Great webs of connection circle the earth.
They burrow in cables under the ocean,
they permeate the air with radio waves,
they bounce off satellites in space.
The world is teeming with nets of interaction,
a global feast of signals, prepared and digested
each and every minute of every day.
Byte by byte, God scans the fragmented world.
Comfortable with every platform,
fluent in every operating system,
God follows every thread to its ultimate conclusion.
God knows where you log on,
when you are off-line and on-line.
God knows your usernames, your passwords,
your physical and virtual memory.
God can hack through every firewall you build.
Maybe you want to think of God as a Webmaster,
so you can choose to surf a different site.
Or maybe you see God as a great Provider
that you’ll log in with someday.
It doesn’t matter if you didn’t look at the readme files.
Someday a window you have never seen will open,
showing you something so fleeting and beautiful,
it will capture you completely.
You will glimpse the power source between us
that has nothing to do with keyboards and electricity.
Great webs of connection circle the earth.
You won’t want to press control alt delete ever again.
I am a Mennonite pastor currently teaching theology at Conrad Grebel University College in Waterloo, Ontario. I’ve served congregations in Ontario and most recently, Alberta.