Machines & Beating Hearts

Just people attached to machines.

That’s what most of us see, when we look around.

It seems like something from a late 1990’s Sci-Fi film that makes you question everything you’ve ever known. But now, 20-something years later, this is reality. I am here at my gym as I type this. People, in a building, going nowhere. Attached to their treadmills, their headphones, their screens.

I am one of them. I like that I can create my own world, inside my hand. I like the anonymity of all this, I don’t have to talk to strangers, no one speaks to me. Headphones are the universal sign that you don’t want to be bothered, and I love it.

Or do I? Where would I be without people bursting into my life and turning everything backwards and sideways?

I look up to see my husband. Sometimes I look at him and remember what a miracle we are. That two people could find each other after all the impossible things, that we wrote our story together, created a whole new life. Created new lives.

I never want to get used to seeing him. Seeing our children. Those sweet, round faces full of so much wonder and promise, everything that is right with the world and worth living for.

I think God sees us like that.

Sees me.

But I don’t think He ever stops. He never gets tired and goes through days with His eyes closed.

He never gets distracted by the endless buzzing of the machines he didn’t make, the noise, the bright, artificial lights.

He never stops seeing the beauty in His kids,

Despite how messy we make things.

How side tracked we get, always missing what’s right in front of us.

He never stops fiercely loving me.

Even when I connect to all the wrong things.

Even when I pick up my smart phone instead of my husband’s hand.

Even when I ignore my daughter to read some stupid comment someone who’s not even next to me said.

Even when I go all day without remembering what a miracle all this is.

Love.

People.

Life.

So breathe in, breathe out.

Because you can, without a machine.

Hold hands and look each other in the eyes. Because it’s all we’ve got.

Sometimes I want to run into the wilderness and smash my phone and live like Laura Ingles Wilder, or at least like me from a decade ago, before this all got so impersonal.

(Maybe none of this is real.)

But somehow I know what’s real, above the whirring of machines.

And I can still hear the beating of our hearts.

Tags: technology relationship connected