The Parable of the Lost iPhone
The other day I was driving home from Costco. I had placed my iPhone on the console between the seats and as I made a turn a little too abruptly my phone slid into the little cavern between the seat and the console. It’s that area where you just can’t fit your hand. You try a few attempts while driving, making faces and contorting your body in ways that make other drivers passing you shake their head and wonder how a person with your condition ever got a driver’s license.
The only solution it seems is to pull over and get out of the car to do a proper search and rescue.
As I resumed my trek I was struck at just how panicked I felt for even those few moments when my iPhone was lost. Getting it back where I could see it and touch it suddenly became of the utmost importance. Before the iPhone went missing I was running lines in my head for my upcoming performance of Not The Way I Heard It. Since this presentation is a modern-day retelling of some of the parables, I suddenly felt the inspiration to retell this familiar parable of the The Lost Sheep. Think about it…Jesus used sheep in his parable—they were something of value that the culture understood and readily related to. I don’t think many of us would relate to sheep and place the value on a lost lamb in the same way we might other things today. If Jesus were telling that parable today it might sound more like this:
The Parable of the Lost iPhone
Suppose one of you had 100 tech gadgets
and then lost your iPhone.
Wouldn’t you leave the 99 other gadgets at home
and go looking for your iPhone?
And once found you can be sure
you would put it in your palm rejoicing!
And when you got home you would text all your friends and contacts saying:
“Celebrate! Like and share my Facebook status! I have found my lost iPhone!”
Count on it, there is more joy in the Cloud over one rescued user profile
than for 99 other user profiles in no need of rescue!
Posted by Chuck Neighbors | 3 comments
Scott Bettis
Very clever and all to real. I have occasionally handed my iPhone to my wife while I perform. Afterwards my wife will hand it back to me with a twinkle in her eye and a grin saying, “There. Feel whole again?”
Chuck Neighbors
🙂
Dayvid Artman
Very good, Chuck. I think you captured the concept very well. I know that when I have misplaced my cell phone (or car keys or flash drive or day planner) everything in my life pauses until I locate it.
One day I drove home from town with my planner on the roof. When I realized it was missing, I recalled setting it on the roof while I loaded some other stuff. Boy, was I in a tizzy! I posted it on Facebook, put a listing on Craigslist, drove my route home repeatedly at ten or twenty miles per hour looking for any sign of it. I was elated the next day when some lady called to say that she had found it while walking near her home. It was wet and mangled and the pages we scattered over half a mile, but I had it back. (Well, most of it anyway.) I stretched a string across the living room and hung each page with a paper clip to dry. I spent hours recovering the information that was inscribed on those pages.
As you suggest, that is the massage of the parable. That is the level of desire (dare I say obsession) that Jesus is attempting to illustrate. This guy was completely consumed with finding and recovering his sheep, as I was with finding and recovering my planner.
No, we don’t get the sheep thing.