I share my time between two homes, the parsonage and our home in Greene County. Mostly, I am at the parsonage these days. It is located in a beautiful rural, country setting near Batesville. I joke with folks in saying the world really is flat, and that our parsonage is right on the edge… if you go much further, you’ll fall off into nothingness.

When we first moved in, we were told the phoneline was so noisy you could hardly carry on a conversation, so I opted to use my cellphone instead. Cell service is a bit sketchy, even with the booster I installed. While it has improved in recent years, the electric service is subject to frequent outages caused by storms, which means no water since we are on a well.

As a techno-pastor, a reliable Internet connection is of great importance to me. There was no DSL available from the phone company (another reason I dropped it). For a while, my data connection to Verizon was sufficiently fast and reliable, but then Verizon renegotiated their tower contracts and put an end to that. I had also discontinued the HughesNet satellite service – its ancient technology and extended latency is no match for today’s cyber traffic.

So… as much as it hurts me to give more money to the world’s richest man, I have been using Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service for the past few years. It is fast, reliable and is constantly growing and increasing its bandwidth. While fiberoptic lines are slowly being installed around here… for now, Starlink is the best solution.

Starlink went down, globally, for several hours yesterday. It was the first true outage I have experienced. All of my devices switched over to Verizon’s data, albeit at a slow and almost unusable speed. The Starlink User Group’s Facebook page lit up with “Starlink is down in _______” postings. Eventually, Starlink acknowledged a global outage and stated they were working on a solution. Suspiciously, this outage coincided with Starlink’s completion of a direct texting infrastructure for cellphone use, and the first to partner with them was T-Mobile. The Facebook page lit up with “T-Mobile brought down Starlink!” messages – as of this writing, there is no acknowledgement of that from Starlink.

I have always detested “cloud-based computing” – where the application and likely your data, both reside on a remote server. It requires an Internet connection to do your work. It opens up another “the dog ate my homework” excuse: “my Internet went down.” This is why I prefer to install software on my devices, which allows me to continue to work, even in the absence of an Internet connection (for the most part).

I was in the middle of preparing a mailing of some booklets related to my upcoming book (a US Postal kind of mailing), when Starlink went down. I was unable to print addresses and postage on the envelopes, as that required an Internet connection, my backup cell data was too unstable to help. So, I just set things aside and went onto a meeting that was on my calendar.

As a culture… we’ve allowed ourselves to be dependent on something that is subject to undependability – as are most things created by humans. It seems we’ve become very good at creating, producing and selling items that, suspiciously, fail a month after the warranty runs out.

The Good News is that despite the angst and anxiety of waiting for an Internet connection to be restored, or the need to replace or repair a broken device… God gives us an infinite and unconditional warranty… that God will not abandon us. Even in times of despair, God is right there with us, to guide us through our pain.

Peace,
-Pastor Tim