Photo by cottonbro studio: (pexels.com)

Madam was telling me the other day how she missed the taxi conversations that used to be.

I had just complained to her about how silent my recent taxi trip was, seeing everyone now imagined traffic jam, not as an opportunity to talk to neighbor, but to swipe the latest comedy on TikTok.

Our chat brought back my pre-internet taxi memories, when a 7pm Meddie Nsereko CBS radio talk show inside traffic jam-stuck evening taxis often provoked reflection and a loud chuckle from a front-seat downtown trader weary from the long day. Until the whole thing spiralled into market women and corporate millenials weighing in on a news event, it felt so organic, as everyone swiped their voices and character into the conversation.

Of course personality often flavoured it all; you heard the smart-sounding corporate guy speak like a real educated one, the father of three spoke from his experience, and the teenager reminisced his ignorance, well, kind of.

Nonetheless, it was an audio spectacle to behold inside this strictly 14-passenger Kampala ride. It refreshed you on what it meant to be Ugandan. Kampalan, to be specific.

Not anymore,

Well, at least as far as my last taxi ride experience, there were more craned necks and video sounds, blue light rays from screens—more than human chatter from lips, lives, and loves.

See, British author C.S Lewis used to say, paraphrase, that the human being you see today, you will be tempted to worship if you see them in their future glorified state.

True, because every day, in doctor rooms, in queues, in taxis, glory escapes us often because of a glowing rectangle in our hands. The middle-aged lady who wants to ask your son’s name gets a cold look at the reception area.

An awkward stare as you wait for your doctor’s appointment could have started a worldview conversation, but nay, there is a red WhatsApp notification beeping. Lately, even those that share car seats look down the phone faster than they glance sideways.

The waiter whose curiosity would have commenced a chat about “things beyond making money” finds you stuck in your inbox. eyes straight!

For some of us, the electronic rectangle is the avenue to our sin, the vehicle that delivers the vilest bits of human nature, sometimes per WhatsApp status, sometimes per second, suffocating the small promptings of the Spirit.

It’s the Instagram ad stealing away an hour meant to explore a new idea; it’s Tik Tok drawing eyeballs designed to see the environmental beauty of Psalm 19. It’s the eye that hasn’t looked up the blue sky in a week!

It’s interesting that when Paul spoke of the now-inaugurated ministry of the Spirit, compared to Moses ministry of the law, he spoke of it in “looking” terms.

In 2 Corinthians 3:18ff, he makes his argument by emphasising how new covenant people are now beholding the Lord and getting transformed from one glory to another. He saw glory and transformation as products of “beholding/looking”—do our spiritual eyes still sense this high calling? We seek filtered glory online and wait out edited transformation stories as they buffer; have we succumbed to the beholding less?

Elsewhere, the invitation to behold and be transformed by the “renewing of our mind” demands and implies that we figure out our modern avenues of constant deformation. Shall we?

This widespread, digital cocaine-like, new “high” means new hearts must nurture Spirit-shaped counter-habits if we are to see the beauty we were designed for, namely, Christ.

I suppose if the English Puritans (or our past generation parents) were “tempted” by going to the cinema or checking into a lodge, we are tempted by a whole mobile cinema and (an updating) porn catalogue constantly inside our now rectangular pockets, or bags?

Yet all is not lost; our thumbs still have a chance to press right, or pause, when necessary. As instruments of righteousness, the coming King has left us with a full armour sufficient to push back, even enslaving algorithms.

The real question is whether we will hear him in the sacred moments, when he requires we put the gadget down, lest glory pass us by.