Auto-Correct.

Monday, September 27, 2010
Auto-correct. Saturday morning was Jake’s funeral at Friendship Baptist Church in Vilonia. It was a tough service for all of us there, and there were a LOT of us there. Standing room only all over the Friendship Church Campus. I saw friends from Vilonia that I hadn’t seen in years. One such friend and I have started talking regularly again as of late. And this friend has moved to Northwest Arkansas in recent years. So during their visit to the Conway area, they texted me and told me they were going to Stoby’s, because they missed it dearly.
So I typed up a simple response that I thought was fitting for someone going to Stoby’s. I simply typed, “Eat lots of cheese dip for me!” That’s simple enough, right? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a master orator to type or say a sentence like that. But I also have an Apple iPhone, and it has this wonderful feature on it called “auto-correct.” And when it thinks you have typed something you didn’t mean to type, it corrects you, as if it has the ability to read your mind. It’s a phone, a cell phone – have I mentioned that yet? Anyway, the auto-correct feature kicked in with that text, and I just happened to catch it before it sent. You’ll never guess what it replaced “Eat lots of cheese dip for me” with…
“Eat lots of geese drip for me.” Geese drip – I don’t even know what that is. Honestly, I’m not sure I want to. Nevertheless, there it was – the auto-correct feature strikes again. Oh, this isn’t the first time this phone has tried to make me look like an idiot. But it was, by far, the most dramatic episode as of yet. I caught it, thankfully, but it just brought something to mind. I turned that feature off for a few minutes last night, but quickly found that for all the headaches it caused me, I was used to it adding punctuation and spelling corrections to my texts and emails…so it’s back on now.
Auto-correct – wouldn’t that be a neat feature to have in life in general? There are a lot of mistakes and bad choices in my life, and in others’ lives that have affected me that would have turned out vastly different, had we all had an auto-correct feature. If we were about to mess up, and automatically our lives were corrected. But it just doesn’t work that way – we aren’t robots. We're free moral agents. And God intended it to be just that way.
Had He made us robots, our love for Him, or others, wouldn’t have been sincere. So instead of “auto-correct,” the child of God has “spell checker.” God shows us, through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, where we’ve erred and which direction He wants for us to go. He leads us, and guides us, and never leaves us on our own. And the great news is: this feature never makes mistakes! It’s always right on.
So here’s to a great, Spirit-filled, spell checked day for us all. And remember: eat lots of geese drip for me!

That’s just a thought, and I welcome yours.
Until next time,
Blake

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