Making The Complex Simple

Have I mentioned that I don’t particularly like the time changes that we go through twice a year? They always mess with my sleep in a very adverse way. Anyway, I woke up this morning at 3 AM and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I was laying in bed thinking and I was looking back over my life from a technological point of view. My childhood was nothing like what children have available to them today. There was a corner store 2 lots down from my house that was run by the Pope family. The front of the store is where they sold candy, sodas and various food items. I guess you could say that it was the first convenience store in my home town. The family lived in the back of it and there was an addition to it where they had a sit down area for the kids from high school to come down on lunch break and buy lunch and eat it.

I used to go up there every so often, when I had a quarter, and buy a soda for 15 cents and a 3 Musketeers candy bar for 10. That was always a treat! And if I had an extra quarter, I would buy 3 plays on the pinball machine. 3 plays for a quarter, can you imagine? Now, you can’t even get a single play for dollar. Guess that is what they call inflation. One day I went up there and sitting beside the pinball machine was a couple of new machines. They were weird looking and one was called Space Invaders and the other was Asteroids. I ended up getting pretty good at Space Invaders and consistently had the high scores in my home town. Talk about a feeling a pride. There was nothing like going up and seeing the initials CAL at the top of the leader board! CAL you say, but that isn’t your initials. I know it isn’t, it was short for California which is where I intended to go after I graduated from High School.

My, how times have changed. I thought those games were so cool, but now they are so simplistic compared to the games available today. But looking back, I see where those games changed my life. Because of them, I got interested in technology, and now I work as a Network Admin keeping all the computers and servers for a company working and talking.

As I was lying awake in bed this morning, I was pondering the complexity of computers and the software that runs on them and how far we have come in the past 30 or so years. But, for all of a computers/softwares complexity, they are very simplistic. Take the most complex Real Time Strategy game, the most advanced Drafting program, the most realistic Animation software, and when you look deep under what makes them work, it’s nothing but 0’s and 1’s. I tell people all the time that if they can count to 1, they can use a computer.

All the 0’s and 1’s that make up a computer program are nothing more than statements telling a computer “Yes” or “No”, “True” or “False”. It’s all pretty simple, really. And thinking about this, for some reason, made me think of God. For all of Gods complexity, He is really very simple. You read His Word and you find that He is the “1” God. You find that all you have to do is say “Yes” to Him. And He is the One who is “True” to us. So, take heart and realize that God isn’t all that complex in what He asks of us. His Word is the software that instructs us. We are the computers that take that software and make a choice of following Him or rejecting His free gift of Eternal Life. Choose wisely.