History of Communication Cont. w/ Application

Last time we started looking at the history of communication. We first looked at how verbal communication came about and without dwelling on that, began to look at how written communication came to be. We will continue in that story.

Characters:
Oog: the guy that got it all started
Aag: Oog's wife
Uug: Oog's brother in law
Junior: Oog's son

Recap of the story so far:
Oog sent Jr. over to Uug's cave to tell Uug something. It got all mixed up and now the whole town thinks that the Red Coats are coming.

The men of the town stood there, shoulder to shoulder waiting for the Red Coats to make their appearance. (The Red Coats were a bunch of marauding barbarians who wore polar bear skin coats dyed with raspberry juice. They were a fearsome lot those Red Coats.) The only man not there to defend the town was Oog. Soon, Uug noticed that Oog was not there so he sent his teenage son Uugo to Oog's cave to alert him to the grave situation that the town of Cavesville was in. When Uugo filled Oog in on the details Oog was shocked! He grabbed his club and headed down to the town post-haste. When Oog got to Uug, Oog immediatly began questioning Uug about what was going on. Uug said, "I was working in my cave when Junior came running in and said that the Red Coats were coming." Oogs mouth dropped wide open. He said, "I sent Junior over to ask you if you wanted to come for supper and if you could bring some bread with you if you came!" They immedialty went to search for Junior. After questioning him at some length, they figured the situation out and sent all the townsmen back to their caves. While talking about the days events over dinner that night, they decided that something had to be done to prevent something like that from happening again. There must be a way to accuratly transfer messages from one place to another. Aag said, "What if you were to make a different mark with some raspberry juice for each sound we have. Then by putting the sound together you would form words and therefore my stringing words together you would have a message!" Oog slapped his hands on his thighs. "I am so glad I thought of that!" he said. "The intelligence of the male mind is astounding!" Uug, Junior, and Uugo concurred. Aag did not and the men didn't get any dessert that night. But from that conversation grew the alphabet and from there simple messages and finally books.

The problem of sending messages to people when you didn't have a runner soon reared its ugly head. Different tribes of cavemen had different solutions. Some polished up metal plates and used sunlight to flash sunlight back and forth. Some whistled or used long wooden horns to call to each other across valleys. Some of the more destructive tribes, of which this writer is a member, preferred the smoke signal approach but they often had altercations with the EPA. "Honestly Sir, the reason I had to send a message to my pen pal in India. That is why I had to burn Yellowstone National Park. That is the only way my pen pal could get the message!"

From those rather primordial beginnings grew the postal system, telegraph, telephone, radio, cell phone, email, instant messaging, etc. And with each of those technological advances, we became more and more addicted to communication. And we have to have more and more options. We can't just have a cell phone now. It has to have text messaging, call waiting, voicemail, and email access. We can't just have email, we have to have several email accounts, Yahoo, Google, and half a dozen other forms of instant messaging. We have our Scholar360 account, blogspot, FaceBook, and MySpace. And if we don't have instant access to at least a score of ways to communicate at any time night or day anywhere in the world, we can't function. What has society come to? We spend so much time communicating with others that we often don't take time to sit and think and still less time to communicate with God. Jesus often got away from it all and spent time in the wilderness and mountains and on the lake. Sometimes it was with his closest friends. Often it was just him and his Father. Alone. For an evening. Or a whole night. Or early in the morning. When was the last time you got alone for a long period of time and just sat and watched the tadpoles swim? You can get a lot of thinking and praying done while doing that. When was the last time you were quiet and let the Spirit search you? I'm probably stepping on some toes now but don't worry....I'm yelling louder at myself than I am at you!