I sometimes sit and think about how strange a time it is to be alive. In the world of technology, more has changed in the last 200 years than in all the time leading up to it. That’s pretty incredible. It means we have to be willing to look at everything with fresh eyes.

Even though there may be things that were true of the human experience for a very long time, they may very well not be true any more.

I was thinking especially about cameras. They’re less than 200 years old. In terms of an art medium, this is one that is extremely young. Even though we’d have difficulty imagining life without them. Which makes me wonder what kind of affect the advent of cameras has had on growing up.

It wasn’t until 1900 that the first camera was mass produced, and shortly after that it became something of a household staple. Regular families started having pictures of their kids. It wasn’t long before they started having pictures of their vacations, too.

What was it like for the parents seeing their children grow up with this crazy device that freezes a moment in time and saves it forever? It must have been fascinating.

The advent of personal video cameras, I’m sure, was a similar experience. When I was growing up, my family didn’t own a camcorder, but I was fascinated by them. I imagine that it would be a surreal experience for me to watch a preteen version of myself on screen. Yet millions of people now have that experience and don’t think twice about it. It just is the way it is.

Now it seems like something similar is happening again with the introduction of social media. Search YouTube and you will find millions of videos people’s children. There’s practically an entire generation of children that are growing up on YouTube. That’s bizarre.

It seems impossible to predict the effects of a rapidly mutating social and technological culture on Children. But part of me wishes I could start right now and experience it for myself.

I’ve always had a number of questions about Jesus. Not huge philosophical or historical questions. More like, practical life questions. I think if most think hard enough, we’ve all had these questions.

For example, we understand that Jesus was both God and man. Fully God, yet fully man. And we understand that is a mystery which we may never understand—possibly even in eternity. But it still makes me wonder. Jesus was born to a woman, he was a child. He had a natural birth and went through the same ordinary functions that any other human being would.

We know that as a child he knew who he was. But what about as a toddler learning to walk? Did he know then? Did he know anything then? Or what about puberty? Did Jesus have the same natural inclinations that other human boys experience at that time, or are those experiences a part or by product of a fallen nature that Jesus never experienced?

These are questions that I find fascinating. In them are quietly embedded some of the most intricate understandings of what it means to be human. It’s unfortunate that the answers to those questions simply aren’t answered anywhere in this lifetime.

I started thinking of all this today because of the passage in Luke I read. Jesus is chased out the synagogue to a cliff which the people intend to throw him off of. He gets away of course, but this is what it says:

And they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff. But passing through their midst, he went away.

“But passing through their midst, he went away”? Huh? I’m forced to read this as if it said, “Somehow he got away”. We know that he was fully a man, but being fully God also, did he wield some power of the crowd that they just let him walk by? Or did some temporary metaphysical change take place and he literally walked through people?

This is one of those passages—peculiar enough to make me wonder—but offering too little information to ever come to a satisfactory conclusion.

I suppose as with many things that will be the case in this lifetime and maybe in the one to come. But if I ever get the chance, I’ll ask him about it. If I’m able, I’ll report back here and let you all know what he says!