10-10-11<\/p>\n
Steve Jobs died this week. For many years to come, the assessments of his remarkable career will scroll down the screens of our lives. In fact they will be innumerable as his inventions and innovations. For he did not teach people how to speak, but he taught how to communicate in new ways. And how to compose, to organize, to perceive, to create, to share\u2026 to dream in new ways. He simultaneously enabled people to realize the existence of new horizons, and believe they actually could reach them. At the same time he developed of array of devices that drive people into \u201cvirtual\u201d monastic cocoons.<\/p>\n
Things he did in the tech world were not only innovations in concept or manufacture: they were seeds planted, sure to grow and grow\u2026 perhaps even in ways that America\u2019s Dreamer-in-Chief would never have dreamed.<\/p>\n
But another reason he will be written about with increasing avidity is the simple reason that, ultimately, very little was known during his lifetime about his lifetime. He was very private, which is refreshing in this celebrity-addicted culture. What do we know of the man apart from Apple, the iColossus catalog, Pixar? It is reported that Jobs was adopted, and that his natural father, an immigrant from Syria named Abdulfattah Jandali, never was able to receive responses from Jobs after reaching out by many letters and e-mails. Turning from the preceding to the following generation, Jobs fathered an illegitimate daughter whose paternity he denied for years, even swearing in court that he was infertile. He eventually acknowledged being his daughter\u2019s father.<\/p>\n
We know that he was a college drop-out. We know that he married Laurene Powell in a Buddhist ceremony at Yosemite. We know that they had three children. Some people are drawn to the fact \u2013 in this economy such things have relevance \u2013 that Apple did not start or subsist on government handouts and bailouts. We hear that he left at least four years’ worth of new ideas and agenda items as a part of his legacy. But we also hear that he was a workplace monster, employed police-state tactics (on his staff, not the competition), and not only outsourced from the US to China, but that Apple\u2019s exclusive factories in China were disgraceful, overcrowded sweatshops.<\/p>\n
Speaking personally \u2013 and I love everything in the App Store \u2013 two impressive things about Steve Jobs\u2019 life (personal, not professional) are that when he was fired from his own company in its \u201cdown\u201d days, he persevered, believed in his visions \u2013 in himself \u2013 to the extent that he not only roared back, but roared back at the helm of his own, former, company. Further, at least from meager accounts, it seems that in nervous start-up days, periods of risky experimentation, good times, public skepticism, several setbacks, triumphs, wild adulation, harsh criticism\u2026 his wife and children always believed in him. Sycophants, stockholders, nor investors cannot replace such a thing. Without it, a man fights insecurity, emotional emasculation, and uncountable stumbling blocks in life. Jobs evidently was blessed in ways that were not apparent to the public.<\/p>\n
Perhaps it was that precious gift that led to reports we have of Steve Jobs\u2019 last days. The writer Walter Isaacson was chosen by Jobs to write a biography, knowing his days were numbered. And from what that book will tell, a priority of Jobs\u2019 last weeks was to draw a few friends, but especially his wife and children, around his deathbed.<\/p>\n
Isaacson quotes Jobs in his last meeting: \u201cI wanted my kids to know me. I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.\u201d<\/p>\n
And a friend, Dr Dean Omish, quoted one of their last conversations to The New York Times<\/em>: \u201cSteve made choices. I asked him if he was glad that he had kids, and he said, \u2018It’s 10,000 times better than anything I’ve ever done\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n Would billions of MAC users and iPhone, iPad, iTunes users (and on and on); would they exchange their toys and tools for the chance that Steve Jobs could have been closer to his kids, that he could have \u201cbeen there\u201d more often? It is an artificial alternative: it\u2019s not a choice anyone has to make, but it sets us to thinking. It set him to thinking in his last hours. There were choices he made.<\/p>\n We come into the world naked, and we leave just about the same way. \u201cAccomplishments\u201d and resume aside, we just have our family on one side of the line, and eternity on the other. I don\u2019t know the state of Steve Jobs\u2019 soul. If biographers and friends write 100 books, I still would not know: that was between him and the Supreme Friend we can know, Jesus. Surely during his 56 years Steve Jobs had that choice presented to him.<\/p>\n Neither do we know the answer to a question that ought to challenge us. When he said, \u201cI want my kids to know me,\u201d and having kids was \u201c10,000 times better than anything I\u2019ve ever done,\u201d were those the satisfied words of a man writing the codes of his last earthly chapters? Or an anguished cry of a smart man who could program everything except his own peace?<\/p>\n + + +<\/p>\n This video is a tender song about that last but most important question we will have to answer. It is not the old hymn of the familiar title, but a recent song with an age-old challenge\u2026 and a tender invitation.<\/p>\n