Holy Brit

I bought a gadget a couple of weeks ago. It was $1.99 so I did not feel too bad in case it did not work - it was one of those wrapping paper cutters which they have been advertising on the TV. Well guess what? - it is a great gadget - I tend to be a lazy wrapper and run my scissors across the paper with the predictable snags and tears. This gadget cuts very nicely and quickly which means that I am actually wrapping as I go - for the first time ever.

Gadgets, very simple little additions, can be great - they can also turn into a millstone around our necks as we struggle to cope with all the bits and pieces which we accumulate.

There is a website called Ship of Fools which has a great page "Gadgets for God" . It is both funny and clever and usefully provides a venue for the gift for the "impossible to shop for religious person" in your life.

Sometimes our practice of faith can get a bit "gadgety". Some ideas and practices are like my paper cutter - small, easy and very useful but I notice, from time to time, that some are more like the iced tea maker I once bought, too big and not helpful enough to justify holding onto them.

Advent is a good time to check for spiritual gadgets which are more trouble than they are worth. It might be a form of prayer which really is not linking us to God, it might be being part of a group which is dysfunctional, it could be just about anything but my gut feeling is that we know deep down when something which we are doing has become a dead gadget.

Equally we can look around for new things to help us on our way. Again I think that God prompts us to explore things and we have to pay attention to that - don't keep putting off the things we think we should try.

Perhaps comparing our spiritual lives to gadgets is not the best - not the good parts - but I think that the redundancy of things which are not very useful to us spiritually and the annoyance of a bad gadget which we find it difficult to let go of - because it SHOULD be useful might be a helpful. You may love your iced tea maker - but mine has gone to Goodwill.