Some thoughts on the passing of Steve Jobs

I have this rather odd habit of checking with Fox Business News before going to bed.  Most likely a leftover from my corporate years.  So I was quite shocked when the Breaking News was telling us of Steve Jobs' death.  I had to immediately text Christopher, the only person in my family that I knew would share my sadness.

A little later, I received a phone call from him as he had begun the hour long drive from his fiance's house.  He said my text explained a text he received just prior to mine from his roommate... asking him if all of his friends were on suicide watch.  Then he said his future mother-in-law, when he told her my text said Steve Jobs had died, asked who he was.

I wish I was there to see the look on my computer science major son's face!  He is marrying into a very intelligent literary, drama loving, liberal arts type of family... who are not at all in the universe of "tekkie".  He said it would be like them telling him "insert famous modern novelist" passed away and I had to ask him who that was.  My fiction reading consists a great deal of dead British authors from the last century.

I've had a little opportunity to digest not only the passing of Jobs but what others have been writing about him.  They run the gamut from idol worship from those in his field to a rather annoying article written by a Christian writer (whose opinions I sometimes value) lamenting the fact that Jobs was brilliant but not a Christian and the insinuation was that we should not honor the man's life at all.

Of course, I wish above all things that Jobs was a Bible believing God-fearing Jesus loving Christian.  I think he leaned toward being a Buddhist.  But that doesn't stop me from respecting his genius.  In my former life... in a galaxy far far away called my youth... I worked in the field of organization development.  I loved meeting with and interviewing  men and women with leadership skills and creative genius.  How I would have enjoyed hearing Jobs talk about the thought processes behind his discoveries.

Just as I am amazed at the men involved in the American Revolution... ordinary men involved in extraordinary circumstances... so I am also in awe of the men who came together to create Apple, Microsoft, etc.  For in my generation we went from manual typewriters... to computer rooms at work... to personal computers at the office... to personal computers at home... to ipads to iphones and itunes and... you get the picture.

I don't think many of us who lived through these great inventions stopped to think how they were changing our lives, in many ways no less than Thomas Edison and the light bulb.  Those of us who write these things called blogs can share our thoughts with thousands within seconds of writing them.  I don't know about you but when my computer is not working, what I miss most is the ability to Google information! 

What is now common place was... not that long ago... science fiction.

Hubby was studying engineering when the data cards had holes punched in them and were given to "experts" for processing.  My daughter helped me "get online" in the 1990's and wowed people at work with her skills on what was a simple black and white design program.

My son wrote his first computer program at around age ten when he developed a game for fellow geeky Internet friends.  He now lives and breaths the world of algorithms and zeros and ones and Apps and Apple and Microsoft and Google and Intel.

I think it is okay for a Christian to give due respect to one who does not know Christ for what he accomplished in his journey on this planet.  Without men like him, we would not be chatting here today.  I honor his talents and pray for his family.  I would love to think he came to know Truth in his final days.

Goodbye, Steve Jobs... you will be missed by true geeks and geek wanna-be's like me.