Last week I had a hum-dinger of an error in the bulletin which hardly anyone noticed, which supports my theory that hardly anyone reads the bulletin!

I mentioned that I'd looked up a question in WikiAnswers about how many pints of blood were in the average human body, and it came back with "about 5 liters", and then I said this was really about ten quarts. I meant to say ten pints! Big difference between quarts and pints, yet often when we read something it flows right by us and we don't see the mistake. We're only human, we say. Well, obviously so was the person who thought liters were pints! Maybe folks are just less and less used to dealing with non-metric things.

My wife got me a GPS as a present. We'd never had one before and had fun trying it out driving around New England. One of the things we noticed is that you are supposed to "update" it now and then. If you don't it can become unreliable. Roads disappear, new roads are built, some become one-way, etc. The little squawk box can't just "know" when the terrain changes. So as precise as it is, using satellite technology to place you within inches of where it thinks you should be, it will eventually lead you astray (yuk yuk) if you don't keep it current all the time.

I'm very nostalgic and probably too prideful, but I have this dream of keeping these bulletins and handing them off to future generations of Crihfields, if there are any. That is, suppose my great great grandson finds himself dragooned into writing the Sunday bulletin. Wouldn't his job be easier if he could just pirate the ones I've already written? The thing is, HOW will I get them to him? The document format of today is obsolete in a rather short time. I mean if I had done these 15 years ago I might have used Star Writer or GT Writer or one of the other popular tools then. I would likely have put them on floppy disk to save them, and who knows what format the disk itself would have been in. Now computers don't even come with floppy drives anymore! My magic ball tells me that in the future you won't buy a computer at all, you'll buy an appliance like a phone which you just throw away and replace cheaply. Instead of hard drives, all your data may be on the network all the time. Eventually someone will hand you a CD or a DVD and say "old grandpappy's bulletins are on here!" and you won't know what to do with it. Seem far fetched? Go grab your 8mm home movie player and let's watch your parents home movies.... Yeah, right.

The thing is, if it's manmade it simply goes out of style. Technology or society move along and make what you have obsolete. Eventually a day will come when I can't update my GPS anymore because no one will support it. My best intentions of keeping my silly prattling on CD for a generation or two will be difficult at best to accomplish.

The bible, which some people say is manmade, never goes out of style. Oh, we don't chase sheep around or tend flocks. And yes, when we "convert" it to something understandable from the original Greek we have to convert it over and over, because our way of speaking changes over and over. But the message, the teachings, the wisdom, the guidance that the book offers never goes out of style. Living righteously never changes, and the rewards don't change either. It's a good thing redemption doesn't change.

Notice this, while manmade things change men don't change. They are still able to find a way to be petty, jealous, cruel, lustful, carnal. That's because while God makes them good, he lets us remake ourselves if we're so inclined. The ultimate manmade thing is us. Will we make something that lasts, or something that goes out of style?

Randy