New Operating System, Old Phone

My iPhone 7 Taken By Me With My iPhone 5

Mt 9:17 "Nor do they put new wine into old wineskins, or else the wineskins break, the wine is spilled, and the wineskins are ruined. But they put new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved."

Mark 2:22 "And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; or else the new wine bursts the wineskins, the wine is spilled, and the wineskins are ruined. But new wine must be put into new wineskins."

Luke 5:37, 38 "And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; or else the new wine will burst the wineskins and be spilled, and the wineskins will be ruined. But new wine must be put into new wineskins, and both are preserved.

This last Monday, I has to face the facts. My iPhone 5 was dying. I think the fatal blow was uploading the new iOS10 system a couple of weeks ago. For months, the battery's charge dropped like a stone once unplugged. I would be at work watching the charge percentage fall. I could usually get out the door at the end of the day with about 20% left.

The new iOS was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

One casualty of this combination of new technology (the iOS, the Apps) and old tools (battery, hardware), was the battery percentage was no longer accurate. So my phone was going from a reading that said a 100% charge literally to 1% in a matter of seconds. I was at an after school meeting where this collapse happened to my phone. As an aside, I have the suspicion that Apple deliberately crashes old phones to increase its revenue stream, especially for those like me who hate the lack of closure that comes from not uploading updates. It is a quicker kill versus the suffocation that happens when one doesn't update and is eventually choked-off due to a lack of operating oxygen. 

Like the Big Indian dude suffocating the lobotomized Jack Nicholson character in One Who Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest. The world will not end with a bang but a whimper (T.S. Elliot)

Fears of me losing my calendar, years' worth of tasks embedded into the calendar to-dos, arose like a spectre. Schools are seasonal and my tasks tend to put them somewhere in the 180 some days in the school year plus some over the summer duties. I have my calendar backed up in the iCloud but I wasn't comfortable considering that one of the walls (the phone side) was falling down...I feared that it would create a vacuum where my data would scatter as feathers to the wind. Both sides, the iCloud and the iPhone, data gone as pigs that escaped the pen.

I had justification in leaving the meeting but I didn't make any pronouncements about doing so. Sometimes it is better to not say anything as to not take the risk of being misunderstood. Keep it unexplained; keep it mysterious and hope that others will grant me the assuming grace that my decision had merit. I don't expect others to understand and appreciate the deep embeddedness of my vocational calendar on my phone and how screwed I would be in its absence.     

My previous iterations of the iPhone were the 3 and 5. I was not the earliest adopter of the iPhone. I was stuck in a hegemonic contract with Verizon and its retrograde phone. This was before the iPhone was available on other carriers. Once getting my iPhone, I didn't upgrade until I had to. So, necessity has always driven my upgrade decisions. Having my phone draining reminded me of a recurring nightmare that I was having year's ago during a time period of particular stress. I would be unable to read my phone's screen because I had misplaced my glasses and then my phone would run out of juice. Technologically alienated. I was in usually a place like New York City and S.O.L.  

I'd wake up in a cold sweat. 

I was expecting another free upgrade on the iPhone but learned quickly of the harsh new rules that I had to buy the new iPhone rather the cost being buried in the contract. ATT had been pushing me for years to drop my unlimited data plan for a reduction of monthly costs. So, I researched my data usage and discovered that I rarely exceeded 1 MB a month. So, I was one of those rare people who traded a contract with a cell phone company and came out ahead. My bill dropped 20 bucks a month. But, now ATT has recouped its lost cash by making me pay for my new iPhone. I have gone from the iPhone 5, to 5, to 7, which reminds me of the Japanese design principle of odd numbers of things having intrinsic beauty.  

Oddly (to use the word so soon again), the metaphor that came to mind when thinking about the software being new in my iPhone 5 but the hardware being old (relatively old, even if only a few years), was the old wineskins and new wine story that Jesus told about His ministry. He blew out the walls metaphorically of the Temple, and literally 40 years later, through the destruction by the Roman Army. Make no doubt about it, the destruction of the Temple was not about some event thousand of years down the road in 1st Century Palestine, but within a generation of the Jewish nation in AD 70. It both amuses and frustrates me that Christians miss the obvious in seeking the obscure. It is like theological necromancy.  

Most Americans no longer mend clothes or ferment wine or grow our own food, so we miss the reality of the parables illustrating spiritual truth. Since I do ferment beer, I have seen the power of it blowing bottles up, like Iraqi Insurgent I.E.D.'s.  I lost 11 bottles in one particularly brewing project. Any time, day or night, a bottle would blow-up. It was another time in my life where the blowing up of the bottles mirrored my life's reality. I waited for the next explosion and hoped it would stop at some point. Finally, I had to uncap all of the bottles and rebottle which created a weird overly-carbonated, to under-carbonated, to perfectly carbonated bottle of beer.  Life's averages can sometimes being the outliers being combined, making it look in the middle when instead it was one extreme side merged with the other extreme side. Life can be great, life can be unbelievably horrific.

In Matthew 9, the key verse for the new wine new wineskin argument is this:

"But go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy and not sacrifice.' For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance."


A hardened Pharisaical rule-based rigidity had dominated the religious life of the Jews. Ritual became the route to redemption. Jesus pointed out that He didn't want the dead products of a ossified old hardware theocratic oligarchy. Instead, He called for people to change, to practice those daily and minute-by-minute operating system and Apps acts of mercy which are the sacrificial expressions of love. Fix what goes into the soul versus trying to repair what comes out.           


This from the hand of Tolkien by way of Gandalf states it well:

I bet Gandalf would have the iPhone 7....    

Eric Bierker Ph.D is the author of "On The Edge: Transitioning Imaginatively to College." A book for the college-bound.