Kindle Christians

If you ask my wife or my family, I must be the most difficult person in the world when it comes time for Christmas shopping.  Truth is, I really can never think of anything I want or need, and so my Christmas list is always just a shrug. This year, for the first time since I was a kid circling pictures in a JC Penney catalog, I actually asked Santa for a Christmas present  - a plain old black and white Kindle.

Well, the big guy delivered!  (ok, it was actually not a big guy, it was my smokin' hot wife, but that would ruin the image)  I absolutely love it.  It is exactly what I wanted - something that will hold all my books, looks like a piece of plain white paper, and just melts into my hand.  There are no distractions on it, not a lot of bells and whistles.  The thing does one thing and it does it so very well.

That's why I think whoever invented the Kindle should be a church planter.  I read somewhere that Amazon actually loses money on each Kindle they sell.  The reason is pretty clear - you take a loss up front but get it back because the device really does nothing but point you to Amazon.com so that you will buy books.  In a way, Amazon is investing in each and every person that buys a Kindle.  Now I'm not arguing that Christians invest in people with the goal of long-term profit, but I am saying that we need to be willing to pay a price and trust that our friends and neighbors can reap a reward from our investment.  We need to be willing to lay down a sacrifice of self and invest in every person we meet, instead of asking strangers to invest in us before they really know if we have the answers they are looking for.

My Kindle is simple.  It doesn't get lost in bells and whistles, it has a core mission and it has been refined to perform that core mission to the best of its ability, in a way that reaches the broadest possible audience.  Think we could use some churches like that?

There are other kinds of Kindles - some with mobile connections, some with touch screens, even the new Fire that is basically a color tablet computer.  You will never see one Kindle attack another for being different, because they all have been designed by the same creator.  The Kindle understands that different people have different needs and they don't mind if some other Kindle is better able to meet those needs.  They also don't ask all people to be exactly the same in order to only desire one kind of Kindle.

Finally, the Kindle - whichever model you buy - ultimately exists to point the user to its creator.  Its really just a dedicated Amazon downloader.  A vessel, that gets all of its identify from its source.  We as believers could obviously learn a lot from that kind of mind set.  We exist as vessels for our creator, pointing away from ourselves to to Him. 

So there you have it - Kindle Christianity.  Wonder if I can get that published in an e-book?