Record players

One day, I had a thought--how did people heat up milk before the invention of microwaves? I asked my mom, and she kindly reminded me about the stove. For heating things up--not just cooking! Weird-sad-inconvenient. To me, that is. And now, I realize that the younger generations probably won't know what is VCR is. So this is what it feels like to “get older.”

But you know, the way that these younger generations won't understand Walkmans and portable CD players is the same way I don't understand record players. I mean, I know it spins and there's a needle placed in grooves on the record... but that's all. And so... It's crazy to think about how God has used everything for his purposes. Harvey Hoekstra of The Talking Bible recently writes about 1964 in Ethiopia,

"Our house was a stick shack the local Majang had put up in a single day. Lavina cooked on three stones and we ate our meals using our boy scout aluminum utensils. This was about as simple as one could get...[One night] I was reading a little book by Joy Ridderhof, founder of Gospel Recordings. She was telling the story of how she began using phonograph records to multiply the occasions when new people could hear the Gospel message in their very own languages.

As I read that story, by the light of that flickering candle, I said to Lavina, "Honey, if we are going to reach this tribe, we're going to have to use those 'wretched records'." I had seen, while living in the Sudan, how unskilled, non-literate people would carry those heavy army surplus record players and the phonograph discs all over the place. I had seen how people were impacted by the message on those discs. And I had seen how just ordinary people became effective witnesses because the phonograph records having the message gave them confidence and a way to share their limited knowledge of Christ.

I suspect I used those words, "wretched records," because of their limitations. Those army surplus players were heavy to carry. And the fidelity of the records themselves was too soon distorted as the phonograph needle made its deepening groves in that turning disc."

So even though some things may be considered inconvenient (or just old-fashioned, in my eyes), I don't think God thinks of them that way. I think he sees value in everything, no matter what time period he uses any particular item in.

--kowai-kawaii