FROM HERMAN JUNCTION TO iPOD:POST #52

My niece had a little thing in her hand while we were sitting at the funeral home with some friends and family. She kept punching around on it and finally I asked her what in the world she had in her hand. She said, "It's an iPod!" I asked her "What does the thing do?" She said that it has a lot of information on it and that she had 15,000 songs recorded on it. I couldn't believe it. I know all the songs in the song books that we have used at church nearly all my life and I thought that I was doing good, but 15,000 songs on that little hand held thing was just hard for me to believe.

You see, it was not long ago at Herman Junction that I was listening to the Grand Ole Opry on a radio sitting up in the window of the house on Saturday night. I moved from that into having a little tiny record player that would play one record at a time and then to a stereo where I could play albums with six songs on one side. Then I got eight track and cassette tapes and moved on to the CD's but that is as far as I ever intended to go in the electronic world.

Why does someone need 15,000 songs on a little hand-held gizmo? How many songs can one listen to at a time? Are all of those songs desirable songs? How long would it take me to listen to 15,000 songs and by the time that I listened to all of them some new ones would have been recorded and I would need to add them to the list. This electronic gadget age is driving me nuts. I like simple things. I mean, I know every song in the song book, "Songs of the church" and I thought that was pretty good but it is far short of 15,000 songs. My Pod was doing alright I thought and then comes this iPOD thing and confuses the daylights out of me. I used to get after the teenagers for passing notes during my sermons because I could see them doing it. Now, they text message and they can do it while looking me straight in the eye and causing me to think that they are listening. I just can't stand it.

I have no idea what else there is in the gadget world that I don't know even exists. I know that we bought our two Great-Granddaughters a little plastic computer each and they like them. They call them thier 'pooters' and don't want anyone touching them. Well, they and the rest of the world may be learning a lot of new things but back at Herman Junction we learned a lot of things in much more simple fashion. We listened to one song at a time, added up our figures in our head, wrote letters and sent them in the U.S. mail, and some folk even had a party line telephone. It was a pretty good system and I liked it. I say, "If it was good enough for Herman Junction it is good enough for me."

It seems to me that the more electronic stuff we find the more complicated life gets. Some folks know all about it and some don't know diddly about it and that makes it hard to deal with. At Herman Junction everybody could turn on the radio and listen to a song or Young Dr. Malone, write a letter, etc. It was simple! Now, I've go to learn how to compute on a 'pooter', work an iPOD, work up a sermon on Power Point so I can show pictures in the church house, and all of that stuff and it's hard for a Herman Junction guy to do that. And, while I am pointing at stuff on the Power Point the kids are having a field day text messaging. I wonder what is coming next? None of this stuff is going on at Herman Junction today and that makes everything well at Herman Junction.