Computers

No. 31 - 12th March 2017

I’ve just spent a lot of my week with my head buried in a computer. I don’t mean literally, but the hard drive broke down, and I had to buy a new one. Now, I’m no expert on computers. I know just enough to do some real damage. Nevertheless, I decided to do this one myself. So, I removed the old drive, and connected up the new one. For the uninitiated, the hard drive is the bit that stores most of the information on your computer, including all the programmes that make the computer work. It was a bit scary, but I knew there was a let out. You see, there’s a button you can press that allows you to take the whole system back to any point in time. It’s a sort of ‘Doctor Who button’. It’s not quite as clever as the good Doctor, because it only goes back to the point where I started loading all the programmes in. It’s actually called a System Restore. Well, did I need it? It wasn’t long before things started to go wrong, and the more I went on, the worse it got. So, I had to press the magic button and restore everything back to a point before I made the mistake. Well, if only life was like that.

I was at a meeting last weekend where we were discussing several things, and I came away feeling that I hadn’t handled it very well. I had said a few things I wish I hadn’t, or at least that I could have said in a better way. I think some of the problem was my desire to show off how much I knew. “Awful” as Donald Trump would Tweet. Anyway, what I really needed was a ‘Doctor Who button’, or something that would take me back to a time before the meeting and then handle it all a bit better. What I actually did was to say to God, “I’m sorry. I messed that up. Thank you for your forgiving me, but I really need your Spirit in me to help me change and not to do it again’. Well that’s as near a ‘Doctor Who button’ as I can think of.

There is actually another option on the computer. You can re-format the disc drive, and what that does is to wipe everything off the disc. It literally puts it back to the state it was in when it was new. The slate is wiped completely clean, and you get to start all over again. So, do we have that same possibility in life? Well, that’s what Easter is all about, so I think I’ll leave that one for now. Meanwhile, I’m glad I found the System Restore button.