Steve Jobs died today. Someone wrote a twitter stating that it was sweetly ironic that most people were learning of this news via a device that his genius helped to create. I myself learned through twitter, but I could have checked my iPad or my shiny MacBook I’m typing on right now. Part of the sweet irony for me is that I use so many of his products that are named after a fruit I’m allergic to.

I’d like to think that I could live without technology, but I do have quite a passion for it. I can’t really remember life before computers, although I remember the old ones and when internet first entered my family’s life. I remember getting my first boom box, then my first cd player, but oh, with the iPod, I was so so happy. All the music I could ever want, in one tiny box I could carry with me anywhere!

For those inventions, I thank Steve Jobs for his ingenuity. I read a little bit of his bio here and was really interested to know that he was adopted…I love that God was able to take a baby that wasn’t planned, per se, and bless a barren family with the child, and then turn him into a huge success that has forever changed the world. I thought it was really interesting that he worked for Atari, and then traveled the world, doing the classic hippie trip through India, living as a beggar for a while, tinkering in his garage, playing video games with friends. He traveled Europe a lot. He had a lot of failures, was fired, rehired. He was headstrong at times. He’s not the classic introverted pocket-protector nerd one might think.

In the article, there is a great quote:

Speaking at Stanford University in 2005, he said, “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent.”

People have said similar things before…no one has ever escaped the hands of death. That doesn’t mean we constantly live thinking we’re going to die. Even knowing and wanting to go to Heaven doesn’t make me okay with the thought of dying one day…this is the only life I’ve known and its weird to think I will one day leave it.

But I think this quote and his life are a fantastic reminder that we all have within us the potential to do great things. And life will knock us down. People can lose faith in us, we can lose faith in ourselves. But if given the chance, and with determination, we can do great things. And we’ve got to live life with the passion and energy, the enthusiasm for innovation and desire to make peoples’ lives better, in the same way that I think Steve Jobs did.