Calling all cars

I have a new cell phone. It is, frankly, beyond belief. I have downloaded (I think that is what I did) aps onto it. Aps, I have learned, are applications. Applications, I have learned, are things this baby can do if given the time and the, well, money.

My phone is a flashlight. My phone is a guitar tuner. My phone is a GPS at the golf course, telling me how much yardage remains to the left front bunker or the back of the green or the middle of said green.

My phone is a translator. My phone has spiffy new ringtones that play Christian music. My phone displays the Bible in various translations. My phone is a money changer. My phone is a player of my many CDs.

I believe, though there is little proof, that my phone is a, uh, phone.

Heck, I am convinced it can drive my car, if only I knew what to do and I could do it without losing my attention while driving.

The Bible, on my phone as well as in my hand, tells me this: "If God is for us, who can be against us?" The Bible tells me, in the Message and the NIV and the NKJ (all on my phone) that in all these things were are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

That being the case, both those startingly transparent facts, what on earth and above it do we have to fear?

The guy in the wheelchair (and that's an important notation) said we only have to fear fear. The Bible even takes that out of the equation and says we have NOTHING to fear. Not layoffs. Not firings. Not health care fiascos (and by the way I would have nothing to add on the subject so I certainly should not be throwing down criticism like so many bread crumbs). Nope. We have NOTHING to fear.

Christians are the most transparent of hypocrites, by the way. We rail about morality, sing about ethical woes but seldom do we cast our bread upon the waters of trust. Instead, we walk about in our robes of fear, worrying about our next worry.

Paul examined all this on some of those incredibly long walks of his and wrote this: "I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons (not the book by Dan Brown), neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all cration will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Look at this briefly: I love the way he writes this...neither death NOR LIFE. In other words, my death won't stop God loving me and neither will that mess I've made called LIFE. Angels whispering in God's ear won't turn him against me nor will those darn demons. Nothing I do in the future nor what I have done in the past will make him suddenly pack up the shop and leave me in the carpenter's wood dust. Neither NBA post player nor Secretariat's tiny jockey will make God refuse to give me the ultimate present at Christmas.

Nothing that has been created (all of which comes under the call of God), will turn the creator into a Billy hater. That ultimately means neither will Billy be able to do this. Death has been conquered. Life has been overcome. Angels and demons are just those people like NBA Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban: too short to play, too loud to watch nicely.

Go all the way back to the beginning. He called us, all of us, for a purpose. What is that purpose? For all I know it's to prune the garden of heaven. But maybe it's to invent aps, or the program aps or to aps the aps of the next guy.

There was a time when the phone was quite famous for being a device for passing vocal data along lines that were strung across the country. Then like the sheepherder, we became a wireless people. So don't argue with me that we are less than conquerors. Be strong. Be sure. Be confident.

See all this evolution stuff had it wrong. It was just a typo. We are not descended from apes. We are descended from aps. We are aps people.

There, aren't you glad you waited for it?