"But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed." Luke 5:16
Recently, my husband and I were reminiscing about walkie-talkies. Many years ago, when our family and my sister’s family would travel together, we would use walkie-talkies to communicate between the two vans. This was when a family was lucky to have one cell phone, roaming charges were outrageous, and cell coverage was unpredictable. So, a pair of ten-dollar walkie-talkies kept us connected.
As I thought about walkie-talkies, I began thinking about how communication has changed in my lifetime. When I was young, to communicate with other people, I would talk to them in person, call them on a landline phone or mail them a card or letter. Now there is email, voicemail, text. There is call waiting, call forwarding, caller id. There is Facebook, Twitter and Tiktok, not to mention Facetime and Zoom. Plus, many, if not most, people have cell phones always in their back pockets. I began to wonder what my grandparents would think about all of these new ways to communicate. I could see them being both confused and astonished and maybe even a bit envious.
Then I realized that there is one form of communication that has not changed and that is talking to God. I talk to God in the same way that my grandparents talked to God and their grandparents before them. We pray. It is almost mind boggling that with all the modern-day forms of communication that I still talk to God the same way that the great people of the Bible talked to God, the same way that Jesus Himself talked to His father in heaven.
I don’t know what forms of communication there will be in a hundred years, but in a hundred years, when people want to talk to God, they will still pray.