I’m still not sure how my password was leaked into cyberspace, but as it turned out, my hacker got hold of my password, logged into my Facebook and Netflix accounts and locked me out by changing my contact details so I couldn’t reset my passwords. Quite smart actually.
On Wednesday morning I woke up to an email he sent to me using my email account claiming to have planted a Trojan horse in my computer to track all my “dirty online secrets”.
This smart pants cyberhacker demanded a ransom of US$400 to stop him from sharing my “dirty online laundry” with the world.
If I had his contact information, I would have told him Google and Facebook have long beaten him to all of the juiciest data about me. Besides, even if such dirty laundry existed, making it public would go down with a whimper. I don’t have any consequential public profile in the greater scheme of things.
Anyway, I had to work with Facebook and Netflix to restore access to my accounts.
Then it hit me, right in the middle of all the flurry, that this is a perfect metaphor to enable us to wrap our minds around what the Holy Scriptures relate to us about the fate that befell Adam and Eve.
In the beginning, the Scriptures tell us, God walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evenings.
Then an unprecedented tragic event unfolded: humankind’s access to God was hijacked, the Scriptures assert.
Now of course many modern minds completely get thrown off by the languaging of ancient story-telling techniques and dismiss these narratives as myths.
Interestingly, as Graham Hancock, who has no axe to grind neither with theism or atheism, so beautifully elucidates in his mesmerising Fingerprints of the Gods, the Hebrew Scriptures are but one of the many indigenous ancient traditions of memory preservation about the origins of humankind for ensuing generations.
The creation narrative, he asserts, can be found in traditions ranging from the peoples that lived deep in the Amazon to those that lived along what is now known as the Mississippi River in the USA all the way to the Nile Basin in Africa.
So, my cyberjacking incident reminded me how humankind was exiled from their original inheritance of being an extension of the family of God on earth.
Jesus came to show us what it looked like when humankind is restored to a family-like fellowship with God.
God’s invitation to humankind is quite simple in fact: stay hijacked or get restored to the originally intended state of being.
This isn’t about doctrines; those are in the domain of religion. Jesus’ message wasn’t about religion albeit the Church has made it like that.
My cyberjacker wanted me to transact with him… give me money and I’ll grant you protection.
Religion projects God or gods as transactional; surrender to me, worship me, sacrifice to me and you will see if I do not protect you and your lot.
Jesus revealed a significantly different God; the one who desires humankind to return to her godly family roots, like the prodigal son.
This is no transaction. It is coming home. It’s humankind coming to ourselves that our belonging is with God, not as slaves, or servants or subjects, but as family.
When I was on a call with the Facebook and Netflix agents, they were giving me instructions on how to restore my access to my accounts… this was different from a transaction that my cyberjacker wanted from me.
Many solutions are touted to humankind to navigate our precarious life terrain, but here is a rule of thumb I have come to live by: if it’s transactional, it isn’t about coming back home. It’s just kicking the can down an unending road, and one transaction will lead to another, just as is the state of humanity today.
Isn’t it time you came back home?
