The LORD our God, the LORD is One: There's an app for that

Confession: I have an app for everything. Apps, or smartphone applications, have recently become the thing that has overcome my life. Now, many of them are good. I recently paid a bill the moment I remembered it from my Huntington app. I can add stuff to my calendar even when away from my computer. I even have swap meets with other iPhone users (some of whom read this blog regularly... you know who you are) where we compare the newest and greatest apps. As for me, I mostly get the free ones, but there are so many good free ones! I have 500 Bible translations in one app, a devotional, three or four news sources (everything from ABC to BBC) a few games, and social networking apps. My current favorite app is TED- which provides great ideas and new thoughts. It's fun. The fact is, there is an app for just about everything. In the four months I have owned an iPhone, apps have affected most aspects of my life. Even as I write this, I am texting on my phone and it is providing me live updates to my social networking (not that I am a huge fan of the live updates... but that's another conversation). And the weird part is, I am usually very excited when a new app comes along that fits into my life and makes it easier. Then I come back to Deuteronomy 6:4-9. Sometimes I wonder if I don't treat God as my iPhone, finding new ways that God can fit into my life. And then God is my newest and favorite app. But as I read Deuteronomy 6, I find that God does not fit into my life, but I fit into God's life. And how cool is that! Seriously! My life is one small existence, the Bible emphasizes that my life is like the morning dew. But God's life is an epic life of creation and redemption, of reconciliation and justice, of holiness and awe-inspiring intimacy. And although God is perfectly content in the Trinity, and is perfectly capable of running the universe without us, God invites us into that life. God invites us beyond ourselves and into something eternal. And so what would my life look like in God's? Now is as good a time as any to reference Robert Webber, author of "The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life." He has a whole chapter on our life in God's life, and he connects the life-in-God to a disciplined life. And at first, that could be off-putting. Isn't a disciplined life just another way of saying "you have to earn your place with God?" He argues it isn't. After all, we are all fairly disciplined people. We are just disciplined to the life we are currently living. Every day we live out promises that we have made, consciously or unconsciously, of who we are going to be. Transformation, therefore, is changing to promises and disciplines that we live by. It is not simply adding tasks to our day, it is slowly, subtly and powerfully changing the kind of person that we are. How is your life lived in God's?