“Go to the ant, thou sluggard, and consider her ways, and be wise,” says Proverbs 6:6. I was doing that very thing yesterday afternoon as I did yard work. My hedges desperately needed a haircut. It was my day off, so I spent the morning doing something that I love, playing my guitar. I got to the trimming around 2 p.m. I am a guitar player, not a sluggard.

“God needs you to have a Bible app on your phone,” the in-app ad states. Accompanying that statement is an illustration depicting Jesus with a look of longing. I enjoy playing Sudoku on my smartphone so, as with most free apps, I must occasionally sit through an ad. The above ad is promoting a King James Bible app and it appears regularly.

Recently over lunch, some friends and I were discussing social media and how online interactions are akin to what went on in the barbaric games of the ancient Roman Coliseum. In my opinion, social media is a misnomer, it should be called unsocial media, or even anti-social media. I know that I have whined about this in the past, but social media interactions have not improved.

Growing up in Canada, my first taste of pineapple was from a can. Those perfectly sliced rings of gold, floating in juice, looked enticing, but they tasted a lot like the can. Pinning them to the side of a Sunday ham and immolating them in an oven did little to improve the taste.

“God showed up!” a colleague’s Facebook post announced regarding a particularly moving worship service at his church. “You’ve got that backward,” I remarked to myself, “it is you and your congregation who showed up.”

Over the past three decades, my library has become almost completely digital. When I admit this to colleagues, they wax fondly on the tactile experience of turning pages in a real book hoping, I guess, to spark in me something lost.

On a recent flight to Indiana, I was only half-listening to the safety orientation, that is until the flight attendant said a word that made me pay closer attention. The word itself was not provocative, it was her pronunciation that captured my attention. “To tigh-en your seatbelt belt,” she informed, “simply pull on the strap.” Tigh-en? What happened to the “T”?

I am writing this from my father-in-law’s living room in rural Indiana here to celebrate his 106th birthday. I marvel at the grace of God in granting him a long life. Our perspective on aging is a curious thing. As children, we proudly marked our years in fractions, proclaiming, “I’m 4 ½ years old!”

Last week, I was pondering the expression, “work out.” I wasn’t actually working out, just pondering the expression; pondering doesn’t make you sweat. “Work out” is a curious expression. If someone says to you, “I worked out this morning,” you assume they exercised. People follow a “workout regimen,” a plan to get in shape.

I occasionally have a troubling dream of the kind students have during a school year. You know the kind, in your dream you arrive at school late and learn that you missed an important exam, or you were to give a presentation that day in class.