External Hard Drive

Thursday 10/3/2013 4:43 AM

I recently bought an external drive for my computer and I periodically plug it in and back up my hard drive.  I have heard horror stories of people whose hard drive has crashed and they have lost all the data that was stored in their computer.  Pictures, documents, videos, programs and anything else that was stored in the computer are gone.  In some cases it is recoverable but in other cases it is gone forever.  Last night I plugged in the external drive and backed everything up so if my computer crashes today I should be able to recover everything.

Over the course of the past few months I have felt as if God has left me.  I had little desire to read the Bible or stop to consider what God might be saying to me through my circumstances and, as a result, I have felt purposeless, without direction.  It seems that the hard drive of my life has crashed and the messages God had for me that were previously easily accessible are now beyond reach.  I find this state of affairs disturbing.  The words of Fredrick Buechner in his book Now and Then give me encouragement today.  “Because the word that God speaks to us is always an incarnate word – a word spelled out to us not alphabetically, in syllables, but enigmatically, in events, even in books we read and the movies we see – the chances are we will never get it just right.  We are so used to hearing what we want to hear and remaining deaf to what it would be well for us to hear that it is hard to break the habit.  But if we keep our hearts and minds open as well as our ears, if we listen with patience and hope, if we remember at all deeply and honestly, then I think we come to recognize, beyond all doubt, that, however faintly we my hear him, he is indeed speaking to us, and that, however little we may understand of it, his word to each of us is both recoverable and precious beyond telling.”  Buechner seems to believe that God is still speaking to me and eventually I will be able to recover what I now sense as irretrievable.  I guess I need to continue to listen with patience and hope and trust that God is backing everything up.