Keeping Tabs

"Hi," I greeted my daughter-in-law, Joanna, as she came in from a church board meeting last night, "The girls are all in bed, I think." I had been watching TV, and all was quiet upstairs where older granddaughter, Allison, was watching Joy, 5, and 7-year-old Beth.

Joanna headed upstairs, but a few minutes later, she spoke behind my chair, "There are no girls upstairs, and Allison's car is here."

We were puzzled as to where they could be, and then I thought of something. "I saw a picture on Facebook a few minutes ago of the girls at the fountain! Maybe they're there!" I checked it again and saw that it was posted 9 minutes ago.

Just then we heard their voices laughing and talking on the porch.

"Did you enjoy the fountain?" their mother asked.

"How did you know we were there?" the little girls questioned.

"Because Mimi saw it on Facebook!" she exclaimed. They had been walking the dog and had ended up at the brightly-lit, multicolored fountain in front of city hall. It is just a block over and a couple of blocks west, and even though it was 9 o'clock, it was just now getting dark.

"Where is it, I wanna see," the children dashed in to search my computer screen for their picture. "How did it get there?" they asked incredulously until we explained that Allison had posted it. They are used to their pictures getting on Facebook, but not that quickly!

It's like a commercial I saw recently, I think about cell phones and texting, when someone shared a bit of news and another remarked, "Oh, that was 18 seconds ago!", making it old hat.

How fast things change! Last night I was watching a movie, not more than a few years old, but when the man answered the phone, a long cord was dangling from it. Then he picked up a portable phone to finish his conversation, and it was enormous!

It seems only yesterday that we had to stop and use a pay phone on trips to keep relatives apprised of our location. And then phone cards came out, and it was a bit of a pain to put in all the numbers to record the charges.

The Bible says in Daniel 12:4, that knowledge will increase. Evidently that includes knowledge of our whereabouts, with GPS, security cameras and cell phones, not to mention Facebook, where everybody knows everybody else's business!