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Last week after an important presentation of relationships at a conference sponsored by AT&T, my hard drive on my lap top crashed. It was fortunate that the presentation was complete for I would have been one frustrated presenter.
This was only the beginning of my frustration. I had unintentionally committed the cardinal sin of not backing up my hard drive files for the past three months. It is a habit that preach to others about constantly backing up files. Oh, I had every intention of backing up, but....(you fill in with your own excuses for not doing the critical little important things in your life). The general excuse I used was that I could always do it later. [Nothing will happen].
All of my work on four major projects in the last three months were gone, vanished off the face of my hard drive. Next came the questions; Why now? How? Why me? What am I to do? It was a time to cry, to get upset, to blame, to worry, to be embarrassed and other kinds of human emotions. All of my work, my Power Point Evangelism presentations, my church work, my e-mail contacts, my time, my hard drive partitions, my downloaded programs and extras gone. Boy was I in a daze. My wife, who often comments about me spending time with my computer girlfriend (my lap top), actually felt sorry for me and tried her best to console me in my grief. With my work in the last three months vanished in front of my face, I could only look at me.
Desperate
Desperately, I went to work to fix it. Almost a hundred times it seems, I tried in vain to cut the computer on and off hoping that note that says "operating system missing" would go away. And after all the diagnostic work I did, I was left with a computer that had its operating system missing. Was I hopeless? I could go not further - "OPERATING SYSTEM MISSING."
Then it hit me - "Its operating system was corrupt and or missing." It needs to be reinstalled. So I got my Windows disk and tried to re-install, but to no avail. Sinking deeper into frustration, thinking the worse that it was time for a new laptop!
Frustrated and ready to give up, looking through my CD files guess what popped out - An "operating system RECOVERY disk." I was trying to get my lap top into shape without the right thing. That was the solution and I'm back in business! Not all was lost because I went to the foundation files and programs on the RECOVERY DISK. From here, I could then choose and pick what files I wanted to restore from previous back-ups. Only the necessary were chosen.
However, there is something different about my old lap top. It acts like new. My lap top was now free of old cluttered files, programs, applications, DLLs, and etc. Gone were things I had saved, but never used. Things that were bookmarked but never accessed - gone. Useless things I needed to get rid of were gone. So now, I do have that new computer I thought I needed. The RECOVERY DISK did it!
So now as I restore my computer, I do so with considerable joy. It's also happier without all the clutter and uselessness that use to slow down my computer. Maybe, I needed that crash to help me decide what is and is not important to file.
Spiritual computer slowdown
Pondering as you approach the day of worship... "What is slowing your spiritual computer down? Are you on the verge of a computer crash? Have you experienced the crash? Are you feeling powerless to fix it? Do you find that during your day is can be said as you access the higher power, "operating system missing?" You need a RECOVERY DISK! May you find it in worship this weekend.