Second Guessing and the Art of Auto-Correction

My grandmother, born in the wilds of Kentucky, traveled by covered wagon as a little girl when her family moved to the sun-parched plains of Texas.   As a young widow, she pulled up her roots and moved to New York to help my mom who had launched a career as a performer for a fledgling new technology called “television.”  Just a few months before she passed away, my grandmother sat with me in front of our own tv and watched Neil Armstrong take one giant leap for mankind.  “Imagine that,” she remarked, “from stage coach to walking on the moon.”

Even in my own lifetime, I have gone from pounding away on a manual typewriter to sending messages wirelessly from my phone.  I have already found myself explaining to young people about what it was like before cell phones.  Imagine that.

But technology has also made me cautious.  While I can text a message on my phone or even compose an email, technology threatens to push me aside, as if the software knows better what I am going to say.  It actually finishes my sentences for me, second guessing what I plan to write.  And while there have been a few close calls, the editor in me always checks what I have written.  Once when I sent a quick message to a friend about the used book sale at the library, my phone’s auto-corrected text read instead, “Are you going to be bi-polar today?”  It almost always changes Justin, my patriotic son-in-law, into either “justice” or “liberty.”  It capitalizes everything from Fourth of July, locations, people’s names, even Target automatically.

All except God

.

No matter how many times I type God’s holy name, no matter how many times I override and correct the technology, the worldview of my phone insists on lowercase “god.”  Everyone gets to be capitalized but God Himself. 

Imagine that.

Let them know that You alone,

         whose name is the LORD,

are the Most High over all the earth.

                         Psalm 83.18