I don’t lose my temper with people very often. It takes a lot for me to get really mad at someone.

But inanimate objects – phwew! – objects make me angry! Especially the ones that only have one purpose – yet they can’t even do that! And especially if their function IS their name, you know, like: Printers. Printers should print! It’s literally why they exist! It’s in their name!

By the way, printers are how I know machines will never be able to take over the world. If you’ve ever interacted with a printer – ever – then you know that machines do not have the competence to take over the world. Machines may ruin the world, but they will never take over.

Things should just do what they were made to do! I have no patience for inanimate objects that cannot seem to perform their sole reason for existence.

If you lived in my brain, you would hear me say this statement probably ten times a day to my phone: “Just BE a touch-screen.”

“Just be a touch-screen! That’s all you have to do: just be what you are!”

It drives me crazy when I touch something on my screen – I can visibly see it react – you know, it lights-up or “depresses” for a split-second, and then nothing happens. I’m like, “I know you felt that! I saw you react to my touch! Just BE a touch-screen!”

Is that unreasonable? Is it too much to ask a touch-screen phone to BE a touch-screen phone? Is it absurd for me to expect a printer to print things? Maybe that’s an unrealistic expectation on my part…

The most angry I have ever gotten in my entire life – I was stressed-out with work, and I had experienced two painful deaths in my immediate family in the same year.

One morning, I was rushing out of my house, late for a work meeting (that’s my fault, but it made what I’m about to tell you even worse). It was raining outside, so I grabbed my rain jacket and threw it on as I rushed out the door – and as I trotted toward my car, I could not make the zipper zip.

Zippers should zip!

Maybe it’s just me. But I feel like it is a reasonable expectation that zippers should zip.

I fought with the zipper for what felt like awhile and just couldn’t get it. So I just wrapped my unzipped-jacket around myself as best I could to stay dry, then shoved my hand into my pocket and pressed the unlock button on my car-key-fobber while trotting toward my car – can you tell where this is going?

When I reached my car and pulled the door handle – it was still locked.

And I absolutely LOST IT. I flipped out and pitched a grown-man-sized temper tantrum in the rain outside my car – I gave my rain jacket and the key-fobber a LARGE and LOUD piece of my mind that morning regarding their inability to do the ONE FUNCTION THEY EXIST TO DO!!

Just imagine with me a world in which things did what they existed to do!

  • Printers print things with ease.
  • Zippers zipped every time without fail.
  • Car-key-fobbers locked and unlocked cars – the very first time you pushed the button.
  • And touch-screen phones reacted when their screens are touched, every single time.

Wouldn’t that be phenomenal? If things behaved as if they WERE what they already ARE?

Now – thank the Lord that He doesn’t view us as inanimate objects. Nor does He respond to us in rage the way I did to my malfunctioning rain jacket zipper and car-key-fobber in one of the lowest moments of my life.

But just imagine with me for a moment, if you can, imagine what it would be like if you and I lived our lives as if we were “highly-esteemed” by the Almighty and Everlasting Sovereign Lord and God of the Universe. Imagine if our daily and moment-by-moment orientation to life reflected the reality that we are “very precious to God.”

When we know – when we understand – when we come to own, for ourselves, the reality of what we are in Christ Jesus before Father God, it would change everything! It would change everything. And that’s what we’ll cover in the next post.