Oh stop, you’re embarrassing both of us.
Let’s be honest, we both know you’re not using your iPhone strictly to look up Bible verses during the sermon. It might have started that way, but it never stays that way.
You started by taking a few quick notes during the “margin moments” of church. You know those, the few minutes while men and women in black are magically changing whatever is on stage or they’re preparing for baptism or giving the ushers the offering plates.
Those are perfect little chunks of time to do some “worship multitasking,” because the truth is that the easiest place to write a to-do list is church. Something about prayer makes us all think of a million things we need to do. So you begin to make a few notes.
But you have to look up one of them online, so you open Safari and next thing you know, you’re searching the Internet in the middle of church. Pull it back together. Get your head in the game.
OK, I’m only going to look at Youversion, the Bible app or Biblegateway.com, this is serious business. This is church. But I wish iPhone Bibles had a little jingle that let people around you know that you’re looking up a Bible verse. I wish they quietly whispered when you opened the online Bible and would say, “Reading the Bible, we’re reading the Bible.” It’s bad enough these punks don’t know I direct deposit my tithe and think I stiff arm the offering bucket each Sunday.
But that’s me, you? You’re playing Angry Birds right now on your iPhone. Or maybe Sally’s Spa or Cooking Dash or HarborMaster. Ridiculous! And if I hear the sound of Bejeweled 2, I might come over the aisles at you.
Did you really just shazam a hymn? Did that happen? That’s when you know you’re a sweaty heathen, when you have to try to use a service that can identify and name of a song. (87% of songs sung at church are “Blessed Be the Name” by Matt Redmon, there’s really no need to look them up.) Plus, you should know by now, only about 17 Christian songs are loaded into the shazam service. I swear, I could play a Lady Gaga song on a washboard and it would identify it, but it never knows Christian songs.
Put your iPhone away, no one, and I mean no one, has the moral fortitude to only look up Bible verses on an iPhone during church. That’s what Paul was talking about when he said “For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” That was about using the iPhone at church. Seriously, google it. Just not right now. Wait until church is over.
