For Steve Jobs, maybe life is like an "on-off" switch. "Click! And you're gone.

Walter Isaacson in his massive bio, "Steve Jobs" tells the story of Jobs attending a Lutheran church with his parents. All this came to an end in 1968 when LIFE Magazine published a shocking cover story on a couple of starving children in Biafra. Jobs took the magazine to Sunday School and confronted the church's pastor. "If I raise my finger, will God know which one I'm going to raise even before I do it?"

The Pastor answered, "Yes, God knows everything."
Jobs then pulled out the LIFE cover and asked, "Well does God know about this and what's going to happen to these children?"

Jobs announced that he didn't want to have anything to do worshiping such a God, and he never went back to church. He did, however, spend years studying and trying to practice the tenets of Zen Buddhism.

Years later, in reflection, he said, "The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it." I would agree. But it's sad that He just shut the door to Christianity based on a presumption that God wasn't doing anything to alleviate suffering in the world. My question to Steve Jobs would've been, "If you are NOW so enlightened, what are you doing to relieve human suffering like that in Biafra?"

When Jobs learned that he had pancreatic cancer, one of his first calls was to Larry Brilliant, whom he had first met at an ashram in India. "Do you still believe in God?" Jobs asked him. Brilliant said that he did, and they discussed the many paths to God that they had been taught by the Hindu Guru Neem Karoli Baba. Then Brilliant asked Jobs  what was wrong. "I have cancer." Jobs replied.

One sunny afternoon when he wasn't feeling well, Jobs sat in the garden behind his house and reflected on death. He talked about his experiences in India four decades earlier, his study of Buddhism, and his views on reincarnation and spiritual transcendence. "I'm about fifty-five on believing in God," he said. "For most of my life, I've felt there must be more to our existence than meets the eye."

He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. "I'd like to think that something survives after you die," he said. "It's strange to think that you can accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures."

He fell silent for a very long time. "But on the other hand, perhaps it's like an on-off switch," he said. "Click! And you're gone."

Then he paused again and smiled slightly. "Maybe that's why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices."

From what we know of Steve's last days, he never had a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. In fact, I believe that's why there was so much uncertainty and contemplation on life after death. Even Steve Jobs found it hard to accept the fact that you just flick an "off" switch and this whole thing is over. Nothing survives except maybe your company and some really cool products.

Steve Jobs' legacy is AMAZING!! It includes the following:

• The Apple II, the first personal computer
• The Macintosh, which begat the home computer revolution
• PIXAR, which gave us "Toy Story" and ramped up the miracle of digital imagination in cartoons.
• Apple stores which reinvented the role of a store in defining a brand.
• The iPod which changed the way we consume music.
• The iTunes store, which saved the music industry.
• The iPhone, which turned mobile phones into music, photography, video, email & web devices.
• The App store, which spawned a new content creation industry.
• The iPad, which launched tablet computing and offered a platform for digital newspapers, magazines, books & videos.
• iCloud, which demoted the computer from its control role in managing our content and let all our devices sync seamlessly.

Apple has surpassed Microsoft and everyone else as the most valuable company in the world. Steve Jobs accomplished a lot in his brief time here on earth.

But, having said that, I am reminded of the words of Jesus recorded in Mark 8:36, "And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything (even creating the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, Pixar, even Apple itself) worth more than your soul?"

The Legacy of Steve Jobs from one who's never drunk the kool-aid.

Recently, I read the bio, "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson. For the record, I do not now own, nor have I ever owned anything made by Apple. There is this cult-like worship for anything Apple makes which leads me to believe that the typical Apple customer has drunk way too much of the Apple Kool-Aid (available only at Apple stores). These individuals may never darken the door of a church, but they'll stand in line for hours to be the first to own a new iPad or iPhone. For me, that's a bit creepy, but it's part of their identity. They hang with friends who have Mac computers and don't want to be ostracized for having a HP or Dell laptop. Having said this, I have great admiration for Steve Jobs. In fact, any business school that's worth anything should have a course or two on the Apple mindset.

Steve Jobs was a genius, but he was also a deeply flawed individual (more about this in my next post). He confided to close friends that he was driven by the pain he felt at being put up for adoption.

Jobs was a master at distorting reality. When confronted with pregnancy of his girlfriend, he simply denied that he was the father, even though he admitted to sleeping with her.

Some Apple (Mac Team) members said that Jobs could almost hypnotize them. "He reminded me of Rasputin," said Debi Coleman. "He laser-beamed in on you and didn't blink. It didn't matter if he was serving Kool-Aid. You drank it."

Now here is what set Steve Jobs apart from the rest of his peers. He had a passion for making a great product, not just a profitable one. The goal was never to make lots of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.

Throughout his career, Jobs liked to envision himself as an enlightened rebel pitted against the evil empires of IBM, Microsoft and Google. He was fighting the forces of darkness and his mindset was that this was the most important thing that anyone could ever do. Jobs lured John Sculley away from Pepsi with the challenge: "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want to change the world?"

That was the slogan that we used in Campus Crusade for Christ when I was in college: "Come help change the world!" We got lots of students who committed to becoming missionaries in Campus Crusade because they wanted to make a difference in the world, and apparently, that's what Steve Jobs thought he was doing with Apple products.

Jobs was like Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. He had a split personality. He could be charming one minute and then very cruel the next minute. He had a perverse eagerness to put people down. I'll give you some more insight into this aspect of Steve Jobs in my next post...stay tuned.