Cult of Jef

In my opin­ion, peo­ple have become really impa­tient over the past decade. We live in a world where infor­ma­tion can be found in sec­onds via the Inter­net, text, social media, or even by call­ing someone’s mobile phone. Have you noticed most of your friends send you mes­sages via Face­book instead of using your e-mail address or call­ing you? God for­bid they should have to stop play­ing Far­mville to com­mu­ni­cate with you.

Per­son­ally, I think it started years before with the high­way sys­tem in the United States. No mat­ter how high the speed limit, it never seems to be fast enough. How can it be that in a 65 miles per hour speed zone where I’m chug­ging along at 80 miles per hour that other dri­vers are still zip­ping around me? Where can they pos­si­bly be going that requires a near attempt at break­ing the sound bar­rier? I could under­stand if some­one is in labor with a baby’s legs hang­ing out doing flut­ter kicks, but all those men behind the wheel can’t be pregnant.

I went with 2Fs to cel­e­brate Mother’s Day with his fam­ily, since my mom is 800 miles away in Texas and, most likely, either at Zumba or belly danc­ing class right now. Jeff’s fam­ily decided to unof­fi­cially adopt me sev­eral years ago, so I always sign my cards from: YOUR FAVORITE ADOPTED SON.

On the way down to his older sister’s house, 2Fs told me that when he was liv­ing in Lon­don dur­ing his work exchange pro­gram in col­lege in 1980, he decided to cook a tra­di­tional South­ern meal for his British friends, so he mailed his mother a let­ter to ask for the recipes.

““You’re kid­ding me!” I said. “How long did it take?”

““About seven days.”

““Seven days! God cre­ated the world in that same amount of time and all you were try­ing to do is get your mother’s recipe for fried chicken.”

Nowa­days, mom would send you a link to her YouTube chan­nel where she’s uploaded a short clip of her mak­ing the dang recipe. Who has the patience to wait seven days–well, really four­teen days, since you have to send your let­ter, then wait for a reply.

It reminded me of when I used to order British twelve inch sin­gles from a mail order com­pany in Illi­nois. I’d look through their cat­a­log, fill out the form, and send my order off with a cashier’s cehck for the cost of the records, plus ship­ping and han­dling. It would some­times take weeks to receive my records. Today, we go to the artist’s web­site, where we can lis­ten to the song and watch the music video. If we like it, we can click on the iTunes icon and down­load it with­out pay­ing ship­ping and han­dling. Who has the patience to wait weeks, anymore?

All of this has com­bined to make most peo­ple very impa­tient lis­ten­ers. We want oth­ers to get to the point before we feel the over­whelm­ing urge to dis­en­gage and check our e-mail, Face­book, or Twit­ter feed. It got me won­der­ing how to get someone’s atten­tion once I’ve lost it.

Jeff’s mother told an inter­est­ing story this evening about their pas­tor, who has a rep­u­ta­tion for ser­mons that go on a tad too long. When he sees the con­gre­ga­tion drift­ing off, he usu­ally does some­thing unex­pected to get their atten­tion. A few Sun­days ago, evi­dently he pulled out a replica of a hand grenade from the podium and hurled down the main aisle of the church. Once he had everyone’s atten­tion, he fin­ished the ser­mon. What a bril­liant idea! I can wait to try that out.