Something always lets you down…

This is gonna be such a butterfly…

It’s amazing how we put our comfort into material things, isn’t it? Maybe this comes on the coattails of me being concerned so much about finances lately, and certainly God could teach me a lot through this, so perhaps that’s the point. But permit me to digress for a minute…

I recently upgraded the operating system on my computer. As you know, I’m a writer and a grad student, so my computer is a pretty necessary tool in my life. And I have Mac. Now, like most Mac users you probably know, I tend to elevate the perfection of Apple computers almost to a religion. We tend to be that way.

So imagine my frustration when two important applications stopped working when I upgraded.

I get so completely frustrated with a computer when it doesn’t work. Always have. One little incident of it not working, and I’m done, fed up, irritated. Which is kind of stupid. But, being a technology geek, I tend to get pretty wrapped up in my toys, especially my computer, because it’s kind of my sidekick in life.

My friend just told me that his computer went down and had to be repaired this week. He’s beyond stressed. We’re going into finals, and it’s just not when you need a computer to have difficulties. I have another friend who’s a law student, and her computer totally crashed a few weeks ago, resulting in losing data that she really needed. It just doesn’t get more frustrating than that.

So, I’m a little irritated tonight, ’cause I’m gonna be on the line with tech support tomorrow morning. But I have it so much better than they do. And, at the risk of over-spiritualizing (again), it’s difficult to understand when the things that we put so much faith into let us down. Or the people. That’s the worst. To be betrayed, totally stabbed in the back by someone that you put your trust into. You just can’t understand it.

But it happens. Because there’s no such thing as a perfect person, and certainly no such thing as perfect technology. And the human beings and things will always let you down at some point. You always hurt the one you love. That is, unless you’re God.

So I guess the Spirit gently reminded me tonight that He’s so much more reliable than a computer, or any friend that we may have, or anything else that we count on. And the bottom line is that we count on this stuff far more than we count on Him.

Just a thought.