Clean Slate

Last week I missed three of the four blog entries I normally post each week. I was not neglecting my commitment – nor had I forgotten you. Rather, I was completely offline for three days due to a nasty virus that infected and then shut down my computer. It was called something like the “Trojan Horse” virus which sounded ominous and foreboding and in truth it was even worse than it sounded.

I learned two things from this challenging experience, both of which possess spiritually significant metaphors for my life.

Lesson 1
My computer started acting up about a week before it crashed. I knew something was wrong but decided to let it slide since my husband, who also serves as my resident amateur computer expert, was heading out of town. We both assumed the daily anti-virus scan would eliminate or at least contain the virus. Left unchecked for five days, the virus multiplied to the point that the computer would not even boot up.

What I learned was not to ignore the warning signs. We both knew something was wrong but our decision to “deal with it” later was a bad choice. The same is true in life. Bad things (like viruses and sin) tend to multiply if left unchecked. Viruses crash computers and sin crashes lives.

Lesson 2
Our computer was dead and ready for a trip to the dump. Then we took it to our friend and neighbor Frank. He owns a computer repair business and is a masterful computer technician. My computer was in need of a resurrection from the dead – or at least a good forensics autopsy.

When my computer met the master, Frank worked a miracle and was able to extract our critical data files including all of our family photos from recent years (which I now promise to back up faithfully) before removing the virus - and everything else on the hard drive. The possibility of losing our photos was by far my greatest concern. God bless Frank for the salvation of our photos, which once were lost, but now are found.

He then wiped the memory clean and reformatted the hard drive three times in order to eradicate the virus. Our computer looked the same on the outside but was brand new on the inside – a fresh start, a do-over, a new beginning.

The slate was clean and the virus was cast into the abyss of cyberspace – a distant and ugly memory that had been dealt with forever. With the power of the virus forever removed, my computer is now able to function as the computer it was created to be, thanks to the touch of the master.

(Don’t let this go to your head, Frank. It’s a metaphor.)

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