Missing Steve Jobs

I was one of millions deeply affected, saddened by the news on October 5, 2011 that everyone who followed technology saw coming.  It was a valiant, tragic battle and Steve Jobs lost.  I was hoping he would be around to dazzle us for a few more years.  In our home we have three Apple computers of varying ages, three iPhones, two iPods.  I am part of that select subset of computer users my age who started with the original Macintosh and have never owned a PC.  There is some lingering evidence that I am a 'fan boy'.   Enough about the product lineup.

I received the Isaacson biography for my birthday in October, three weeks after Steve Jobs died.  I devoured it.  Most of the major events I knew, the Steve outside the product launches is who I learned about.  He was both more brilliant and more flawed than I realized.

So, who was Steve to me?  I have been wrestling with that question for several months now.  I never met him, never saw him in person, never attended any of the Apple events held a few hundred miles north of where I live.  He seemed a highly successful older brother, a remote alter ego.  I have always been a conforming people-pleaser, having my behavior and objectives almost entirely defined by what others expected.  Steve lived to change people's expectations.  And he did.  In big ways.  Not always positively.  Which means that people who know me have less angst and more good will than many of those who remember Steve.  Still, I miss the magic, the reality distortion field, the intensity with which he chased his vision for simple, incredible technology, the way he guarded both the privacy of Apple R&D and the privacy of his family.

It isn't true that life goes on.  Life ends.  Every day.  Or, perhaps more in line with my faith, life transforms into… what?  Regardless, it certainly ends as we know it.  And while there are lots of fascinating stories of people returning from the other side, these are still just glimpses through darkly tinted windows, not feature-length documentaries recorded in Blue-Ray quality.  That is why belief in the eternal takes more faith than belief in tomorrow's sunrise.  I don't KNOW what happens when the heart stops, the brain-scan flat-lines, and the last breath exhales.  Only God KNOWS.  The rest of us hope and trust.  I was moved by Mona Simpson's eulogy of Steve and his last moments.  Steve crossed the line, and in that moment saw something the rest of us will see some day.

I must resist the urge to critically evaluate Steve's life through the rigid lens of my theology for a couple of reasons:  I don't know enough about Steve, and I don't know enough about God.  Charles Moore provided what seems to me a fair evaluation after Steve's poignant Stanford commencement address in 2005.

When push comes to shove, that is, when the casket is pushed out of the hearse and shoved into the ground, the certainty of the eternal destiny of someone you love becomes far more ambiguous.  For much of my Christian experience, it was very formulaic.  The Christians go to heaven, the rest go to hell.  Somehow, when it is your own flesh-and-blood, and you know they didn't have time for a last minute 'come to Jesus' moment, deep in your gut you hope that God's mercy is more generous than your theology.  I can say that because when my real brother died in a sudden, tragic accident over a decade ago, I knew what my theology would say his destiny was.  I also knew that if I accepted that, I couldn't live with my faith.  And in my experience, that is true of most Christians in that circumstance.  They broaden the tent of God's grace to accept one more sinner.  Does  that mean I believe in 'universalism' - everyone goes to heaven?  No.  I still believe in eternal justice.  I just have no way to know where the boundary is between justice and mercy.

And that best explains what Steve Jobs is to me:  Someone who helped me relinquish dreaded theological certainty and instead trust more in the unfathomable love of God.  My hope is that somewhere in eternity, my brother and Steve Jobs will have a chance to talk about their lives that were cut short and the grace that let them live forever.