Like so many others I have been saddened by the death of Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs. Four weeks after his passing the articles and tributes keep coming out. I have been intrigued to read the details of his life and the story of how he created the gadgets that sit on my desk and are a part of my daily life. I wake up to an alarm on my iPhone, read the morning papers on my iPad and work throughout the day on my MacBook Pro. I am an unabashed Apple junkie. All of these gadgets came from the incredibly fertile mind of Steve Jobs.

When Walter Isaacson's biography, Steve Jobs, was published last week I had it downloaded to my iPad via the Kindle App–a fitting tribute I thought. It's a fascinating story of an adopted boy who grew up in what is now called Silicon Valley at the dawn of the personal computer age. Jobs certainly changed the world of technology in our time and left a legacy of creativity and marketing savvy. I think that Steve Jobs understood his times about as well as anyone and brought to market tools that allow people to use words, pictures and music to enhance their lives.

This morning I read a moving tribute from Jobs' sister, Mona Simpson. She says her brother's final words before dying were, "OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW." What Jobs meant or experienced at that moment is unknown. Those who believe in a conscious afterlife will conclude he was seeing something "beyond". What I find interesting about this account is its position against what Jobs says he did ponder in his last days as he knew death was near.

Jobs left behind organized Christian religion in his youth when he could not reconcile the idea of a loving, all knowing and all powerful God with the human suffering he saw in the world. In the late sixties he looked at the pictures of dying children in Biafra and decided there must not be a God, or at least the God of his parent's Lutheran faith. The lack of logical and scriptural answers caused him to turn to eastern religion embarking on a lifelong faith based on a study of Buddhism, reincarnation and spiritual transcendence.

"I'm about fifty-fifty on believing in God. For most of my life, I've felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye." To his biographer Jobs said, "I like to think that something survives after you die. It's strange to think that you 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. But on the other hand, perhaps it's like an on-off switch. Click! And you're gone."

Like many of his generation Jobs lived a life of his choosing devoid of belief in the traditional religion of his parents. While it was a life of continual searching for truth in the end he came back to the beginning and found it was not quite where he began, it was at least with a lingering question that remains to be answered.

Whatever prompted his "WOW" it fell far short of the glory of God's future reality which awaits Steve and all of us.

Whatever Steve Jobs believed the day he died is known but to God. One day he will know what "WOW" really means. It will be incredibly great.