My five-year-old daughter, Maya, blurted out recently that she was texting God. I asked her what she was saying. She started reciting random numbers, before settling on 1,1,1,1. She obviously has a firm understanding of the nature of monotheism, the oneness of God.
I still tried to box her into an answer, so I asked again. She finally told me that God brings out the stars. The stars are important in our home since my wife died last August. I've told her that Mommy is a star in heaven, so Maya has something concrete to gaze at in the night sky.
Maya may have combined her fascination with the cosmos, the place her mother resides, with contacting or texting God. I know people leave crumpled notes to God in the cracks and crevices of Jerusalem's Western Wall, Judaism's holiest site, but texting God is so 21st century.
It is also part of today's younger generation. One high school student told me that she sent out or received 15,000 messages in one month. AT&T said the average teenager punches out about 3,500 per 30-day period.
My thirteen-year-old son, Miguel, like almost everyone under 30, is enamored with the technology of cell phones and iPods. He actually wondered, when informed that iPods and cell phones are relatively new technologies and were not part of my childhood, how I could've lived back then. He was convinced it must have been very boring.